Zagreb School of Economics and Management

Student life is shaped less by any single feature of an institution than by the ordinary rhythm around it: how the teaching week is arranged, how far you live from where you study, how much of your time is timetabled and how much you organise yourself. Before committing, it helps to establish the practical shape of your own week. Ask whether teaching is concentrated into particular days, whether attendance is expected in person, and how assessment is spread through the term. Our general orientation on what student life involves covers the patterns most students recognise wherever they study.

The other half of student life is what happens outside the timetable, and that varies enormously between institutions and between individual students at the same one. Establish what student-run societies, sports facilities, faith or wellbeing provision and volunteering routes exist, and how a newcomer joins them. Student services or the students' association are the offices that hold this information, and they are worth contacting directly. Building a circle takes deliberate effort in an unfamiliar place, which is why we wrote a guide to finding people and keep more on community and wellbeing generally.

Zagreb is a city you will be living in as well as studying in, so treat the city and the institution as two separate things to establish. Ask about getting between accommodation and teaching sites, what the working language of daily student administration is, where students go when they want somewhere quiet to work, and what the year looks like when teaching is not running. The institution's student services office can answer the campus half of that; the rest you learn by asking students already there.

Accommodation is the part of a move that most often goes wrong, and it goes wrong for a predictable reason: students leave it until the offer is confirmed, by which point the easiest options have gone. Start early, before you have any certainty, by establishing what kinds of housing exist for students here, whether the institution operates or allocates any accommodation itself, whether it maintains a list of approved private options, and whether any of it is set aside for students arriving from abroad. The accommodation or student services office is the place to ask, and it is worth asking before you need the answer.

Then establish the mechanics, which differ far more than people expect. How do you apply, and is it a separate application from the academic one. When does the application open and when does allocation happen. Whether a deposit is required, what would be included in a rent and what would be billed separately, how long a contract runs, and what happens in periods when teaching is not running. If you would be signing a private tenancy, ask what you are agreeing to and whether a guarantor is expected. Our housing search guide walks through the sequence.

Give thought to what you actually need to live well, not only to what is cheapest: distance from teaching, whether the space is furnished, whether cooking facilities are shared, and how noise and study space work in practice. Sharing raises questions of its own about how bills and shared costs are split, which we cover separately. More on the day-to-day of shared and institutional living is on dorm life and student housing.

If you are applying from another country, the useful move is to sort what you must establish into categories rather than trying to answer everything at once. There are four. First, your academic standing: how the qualifications you already hold are assessed here, whether any formal recognition or evaluation of prior study is involved, and who carries that out. Second, language: what language your intended programme is taught and assessed in, whether any evidence of language is part of the application, and what language the surrounding administration runs in. Third, entry and permission to stay: what the relevant official authority requires of someone in your situation, how long its process takes and when it can be started. Fourth, arrival: registration steps, healthcare arrangements, opening a bank account and getting a local phone number.

On every one of those, the answer that matters is the one you get from the institution's international student office and from the relevant official authority, never from a summary page like this one, and never from another applicant whose circumstances may differ from yours in ways neither of you has noticed. Ask both, in writing where you can, and ask early enough that a slow reply does not become a problem. Where a document may need translating, certifying or otherwise preparing, that step takes time on its own and is worth identifying at the start rather than discovering later.

Do not assume that a category you have been placed in elsewhere carries over. You will need to establish which category this institution places you in for admission and for fees, and put that question to the institution directly rather than inferring it. Once the paperwork is moving, the practical side of arriving is worth preparing for too, preparing to go, the first weeks and managing in another language all cover ground that catches people out. Broader orientation sits under studying abroad.

This page lists no requirements, deadlines or selection criteria, and that is deliberate. What applies to any given applicant depends on the programme, the level of study, the year of entry and the applicant's own background, and any of those can change between one cycle and the next. A page that repeated last year's rules would be worse than useless: it would look authoritative while being wrong. The official website linked on this page is the source that counts.

The reliable method is to work from the specific to the general. Identify the exact programme and level you want. Open that programme's own page on the institution's site and read what it says about applying. Note the entry route it names, the documents it asks for, and the timetable it sets out. Then contact the admissions office to confirm that you have read it correctly for your own situation, and ask what it needs from someone applying from where you are.

Two habits save people trouble. Keep a written record of what you were told, by whom and when, so that later questions have a starting point. And ask about the sequence as well as the substance, what happens after you submit, how and when decisions are communicated, whether anything must be accepted or paid by a certain point to hold a place, and what happens if a document arrives late. If you are weighing several institutions at once, our university index and the surrounding guides may help you keep the comparison organised. How we compile and check these pages is set out in our sources and methodology.

No fee figure appears anywhere on this page. Published amounts change, they differ between programmes and levels, and they can depend on which category an institution places a particular student in. A number copied here would be out of date without anything on the page showing it, and a student could reasonably plan around it and be wrong. So we point to the source instead of reproducing it.

There are also structural things that may be the case and that you should check rather than assume. Rates may be published per programme and per faculty rather than as a single institution-wide figure, and a published amount may cover a full year or a shorter period. Establish which of those applies before comparing anything with anything else. It is also worth asking what is and is not included in a quoted amount, whether any separate charges accompany it, and what the payment schedule looks like across the year.

Fees are only one half of the budget, and often not the half that surprises people, living costs run every month regardless. We keep those two separate for that reason, and there is more on how fees are structured, on checking a figure at source and on support and funding basics. For the amount that actually applies to you, go to the institution's own fee pages for the relevant year of entry, and confirm with its admissions or finance office.