The University of Queensland

What day-to-day life feels like as a student depends on a small number of practical variables, and they are worth establishing before you arrive rather than after. How many contact hours does your programme usually involve, and how are they spread across the week? How much of the work is expected to happen independently? Are the places you need to be within walking distance of each other, or does a normal day involve travel? The student services team and, where one exists, the students' association are the right people to ask, and they generally answer this kind of question readily.

Beyond timetables, student life is made of the things that are optional. Clubs, sport, performing arts, volunteering, faith groups and student-run organisations tend to exist in some form almost everywhere, but their scale, their joining process and whether they cost anything vary widely. Ask when the main recruitment period falls, whether anything runs outside term, and whether there are groups aimed at students who have just arrived. Something as ordinary as a weekly fixture in your calendar does a lot of work in the first few months; building a circle of people goes into why.

It is also worth knowing what support sits behind all of this. Most institutions have academic advisers, wellbeing services, disability support and someone whose job is specifically the transition into first year, but you will not find them by accident. Ask who to contact for each, and note it down before you need it. Our material on the shape of student life and looking after yourself while studying is general, and the institution's own services are the specifics.

Start by establishing what the institution provides directly. Does it operate its own accommodation, is any of it reserved for particular groups of students, is applying a separate process with its own timetable, and what happens if you apply after that timetable has passed? Only the accommodation office can answer these, and the answers can differ from one intake to the next, which is why we do not attempt to summarise them here.

If the answer points you towards the private market, then the questions change. Establish how far in advance people commonly begin looking, what a typical agreement commits you to and for how long, what is usually paid up front, and what happens to that money at the end. Ask whether the institution offers any advice, checking service or list of options for students renting privately, and use it if it exists. Reading an agreement properly before signing is the single most useful habit here; our guide on looking for housing from a distance and the wider material on student accommodation set out the process.

Arranging accommodation early matters because so much else depends on it. An unresolved address tends to sit underneath every other task and makes the first weeks harder than they need to be, and late searching narrows what is available rather than widening it. If you will be sharing, settle the practical arrangements in advance rather than improvising them: splitting costs with flatmates and shared living cover what usually needs agreeing.

An applicant arriving from another country has a set of separate problems that are easy to run together. Keep them apart. There is the question of permission to enter and study, which is decided by a government authority. There is the question of what the institution needs from an applicant educated elsewhere. There is language of instruction and any evidence attached to it. There is health cover and how you would access care. There is money: how you will hold it, move it and pay with it. And there is arrival: when you are expected to be present and what has to happen in the first days.

Each of those belongs to someone specific. The institution's international student office is the right first contact for anything the institution itself decides or requires, and it can usually tell you which official authority handles the rest. Go to that authority's own published guidance for anything to do with entry, permission or legal obligation, and treat only that source as authoritative on what is currently required. We will not summarise it, because summarising it accurately over time is not something a third party can promise.

One further category is easy to overlook. Establish which classification the institution places you in for administrative purposes and what follows from it, since a single classification may affect several separate matters at once. Ask the question directly rather than inferring the answer from your nationality or your address. Our material on moving abroad to study, preparing to go and the settling-in period is about the process; the international office is about your case.

There are no requirements, deadlines or selection details on this page. They belong to the institution, they vary between programmes, and they change. What follows is a way of finding what applies to you, which is more durable than any figure we could copy across.

Begin at the institution's own admissions section and work down to the individual programme, because entry information is usually attached to a course rather than to the institution as a whole. Establish four things: the exact programme and its identifying code or title, the route by which applications are submitted, what the institution asks of applicants whose prior study was completed in another country, and the institution's published timetable for the intake you want. If any of these is unclear on the page, ask the admissions office in writing and keep the reply.

Two habits make this easier. First, check that you are reading the page for the intake you actually intend to join, since institutions often keep material for more than one cycle live at the same time. Second, if your background does not map neatly onto the standard question, ask who handles that; there is almost always someone, and the situation is more common than it looks from outside. For general preparation rather than requirements, see how to research institutions and adjusting to a different academic culture.

No fee figure appears anywhere on this page. Published amounts change between intakes, differ from one programme to another within the same institution, and can differ between two students taking the same course. Reproducing a number here would give you false confidence in something you would then have to check anyway, so we send you to the institution's own fee pages instead and concentrate on helping you read them.

Before you do, note one thing that may be the case and that you should verify rather than assume. An amount may be quoted per unit of study rather than per year, which changes entirely what a total means; the same figure can describe a component of a year's study or the whole of it, and the difference is substantial. Related to this, whether a student is charged at all, and on what basis, may depend on the category the institution places them in. Establish that category with the institution first, because it determines which of the published figures are the ones you should be reading.

When you reach the official pages, confirm three things: the year of entry, the exact programme, and what sits inside the quoted amount as against what is billed separately. Then work out the wider picture, since tuition is only one part of what a year costs. Our guides on how fees are usually structured, tuition against living costs and funding and support in general terms are written for exactly that stage of planning.