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Ask what shapes a student's experience anywhere and the honest answer is mundane: the timetable, the distance between the places you need to be, the rhythm of assessment, and how much of the week is organised for you as against left to you. Those things differ by department and by level of study far more than they differ between institutions, which is why the useful question is about your own programme rather than the place as a whole. Ask what a normal teaching week involves and how assessment is distributed through the year. Our orientation on student life lists what is worth asking anywhere.

The unstructured part matters just as much. Societies, sport, volunteering, student media, part-time work and course-based groups are the usual routes into knowing people, and which of them run here is a question for student services or the students' union. Ask what is on during the first few weeks and what continues afterwards, and whether joining anything carries a cost. It is also worth mapping the support that exists before you need it, since academic advice, wellbeing services, disability support and financial guidance all have their own front doors, and finding them under pressure is harder than finding them in advance.

Somewhere to live is the arrangement that most often becomes urgent, and the students who find it straightforward are almost always the ones who started early. The first question is whether the institution offers accommodation itself, how you apply, whether that application runs separately from your programme application, and whether places are limited or allocated in a particular order. A place on a course guarantees nothing about a room. The accommodation office holds the real answers and is worth contacting well before you need to decide.

Renting privately raises a different set of questions, and they are worth asking before you are under time pressure. What does a standard tenancy here commit you to, and for how long. What deposit is usual and how is it held. What must be paid before you receive keys. Does anyone need to guarantee the agreement on your behalf, and what happens if you cannot provide one. Which bills are included in the rent and which arrive separately. Read the whole agreement before you sign it, and arrange help reading it if that would be useful. The general guide to finding housing from another country covers the sequence.

Where you live shapes the rest of your week, so check the actual journey to teaching rather than judging by a map, and think about what an evening event or an early start would mean from that address. If you are sharing, settle the money arrangements before moving in, because how shared costs get handled causes more friction than almost anything else in shared housing.

If you are applying from another country, several things need establishing that a local applicant never has to think about, and it is worth working through them as categories. Begin with your own status: which admissions and fee category this institution places you in, and on what basis. That determination belongs to the institution, it affects both process and cost, and it is not something to assume. Ask admissions to confirm it in writing and to tell you what evidence they need.

Permission to enter and study is granted by an official authority and not by any institution. The institution cannot tell you what that authority will require or decide. What the international student office can tell you is what part the institution plays, meaning which documents it issues, on what timeline, and what it needs from you before it can, and that is where to start. Take every question about entry, conditions or timing to the relevant official authority and rely on what it publishes rather than on second-hand accounts.

Qualifications and language form a further category. Establish how credentials awarded in another country are assessed here, whether translation or formal evaluation is expected, and what evidence of language ability your specific programme calls for. Confirm which language your teaching and assessment are conducted in, and separately establish which language you will be using for administration, appointments and everyday arrangements. Then plan the arrival sequence: institutional registration, any registration required of new arrivals, banking, healthcare cover, and the order in which those depend on one another. Ask the international student office what it assists with and what falls outside its remit, then confirm the rest at source. The preparation guide turns all of this into a plan.

There are no requirements listed on this page. Entry criteria depend on the programme, the level, the admission cycle and where your qualifications were awarded, and they are revised. Copying them here would create something that reads as authoritative while quietly ageing, so what follows is a method for finding the version that actually applies to you. Go to the institution's own admissions pages and work down to your specific programme, not just the institutional overview.

Requirements and processes can differ between programmes within the same institution, and between levels of study within the same programme. Identify the intake you are applying for, then look for whatever the institution publishes specifically for applicants whose qualifications come from another country, which is usually a separate route with separate instructions. Where the published guidance leaves a question open, ask the admissions office directly rather than reasoning from what seems likely, keep the answer, and note which cycle it refers to. Reading an institution's own pages carefully is a skill in itself.

No fee figure appears here. We do not publish tuition amounts for any institution, because tuition is set by the institution, differs by programme and by the fee category an applicant is placed in, and is reviewed on its own schedule. A figure reproduced on a third-party page acquires an air of authority it has not earned and cannot keep current, which makes it worse than no figure at all.

It is also worth being careful about what you are looking at when you do find a number. It may be a total cost of attendance, in which tuition is rolled together with estimated living costs and other expenses into one planning total. It may be a net price, calculated as an estimate from the circumstances of a particular household and specific to it. It may come from an interactive estimator that returns a figure only after you have answered a set of questions about yourself. All of these may be published, and none of them is the tuition rate. Work out which kind of number you have before treating it as one.

The dependable route is the institution's own fee pages, read for your programme, your level, your fee category and the year you would begin, followed by a direct question to the admissions or finance office about what the figure includes and what is billed separately. Living costs sit in a different part of your planning altogether. Our guide to fees as against living costs explains why the two are best kept apart.