You´re a new Erasmus student?

After receiving your Erasmus confirmation email, the first thing you should do is celebrate, but afterwards there is a mountain of things to think about: the university, the city, the course, looking for a place to live, learning the language (if you´re going somewhere where they speak one different to yours) etc. It´s a bit overwhelming, right?

I´ll start with some tips put together from my own experience:

• Visas. It´s easy enough to start, just go to the embassy´s website and you´ll find a list of requirements. Try and start from here. You don´t want time to hold you back, so make a date, sit down and start filling in the documentation. I explain this point in detail in another article - it´s called ´The headache of visas´. There you´ll find some advice about how to travel to different countries during your Erasmus exchange.
• Fill out the document on what modules you want to study at your new university. I´d done an exchange before, through Criscos, and I learned that it´s necessary to get a bit of guidance before making this decision, for instance, what are the teachers like, what kind of tasks or activities does this course contain, etc. In every university there´s going to be a teacher you wish you´d never shared air with, and a teacher who changes your entire vision of life, but it´s not always possible to find an ex-Erasmus student who did the same course as you to tell you who these are. My advice on solving this - I searched the course title and university on Facebook and sent a few friend requests. When they accepted, I just asked them to tell me a bit about the module - doesn´t seem hard, right? It took me three days to decide on my modules with this extra help.
• Get started on the flat hunt. I spent a few days looking online, here there and everywhere, and nobody, absolutely nobody responded to my messages, since landlords and landladies prefer to know they´re entering into something serious; meaning they much prefer it when people come to look at the flat in person. Because of this, these ended up being some frustrating and fruitless days. Wonderful Facebook helped me (luckily, there´s a Facebook page for almost everything nowadays), in the form of the group ´Erasmus Ravenna´ and it was there I found ex-Erasmus students who gave me details of the houses and flats they´d stayed in, and also future Erasmus students who would be in the city at the same time as me. Through this, I met a very sweet Greek girl who I lived with during my time as an Erasmus student.
• Learn or practise the language. If you´re going to a country where they speak a different language to yours, prepare yourself. In my case, I had to learn Italian. I have to admit that it was pretty hard - I´d studied Italian to B2 level for my previous exchange, but it had been a few years ago and I didn´t remember very much. When I first arrived I had a lot of difficulties at university, as the Italian was fast, technical and mixed with slang and words hailing from Italian dialects of the surrounding region - for me, it may as well have been Chinese! I´m proud to say though that I overcame this with ease and much better than other friends of mine. My advice is something which I learned from my first exchange, and that´s not to limit yourself just to being friends with the other exchange students! They´ll go home to their own countries, and when you feel nostalgic, you won´t have many people to visit back in the place you did your Erasmus. Many of them speak your own language already or you have to communicate in English, but right now, you need to communicate in the language of the country you´re living in. Look for native friends, groups and activities in the city with natives. I was very lucky, since as I said before I met a nice girl from Greece and we found a lovely house together in which nobody spoke English - so we literally had to sit down at the dinner table with a dictionary! I learned a lot during the two months by watching films in Italian, by speaking, listening to the radio, etc. I also learned a lot about the culture and got to know a lot of brilliant people.

I hope this information helped you! I´m planning on writing another article where I´ll give some tips on what to take and what not to take.

Good luck. :)