Arrival & settling in
Register for the residence permit, enrol, open a bank account and find your community — the first month decides how the year goes.
The first weeks have hard legal deadlines, and they are easy to miss while you are still jet-lagged and looking for a flat. Most European countries require you to apply for a residence permit or register your address within a short window of arrival — often eight to thirty days. Find out your country's rule before you fly and treat it as the first appointment you make, ahead of anything social.
Complete university enrolment in person, collect your student card and confirm your module registration. This is also when you find out about the practical support that exists — student services, the international office, hardship funds, language courses, and the health system you are now inside.
Open a local bank account early, because rent, phone contracts and part-time work all depend on it. Most banks want your residence registration and student enrolment first, which is another reason to do those in the right order. A local SIM on day one makes every other appointment easier to arrange.
Then do the part nobody puts on a checklist: find people. Bangladeshi student associations exist in most European university cities and they are the fastest route to knowing which supermarket is affordable, which landlord to avoid and how the part-time work market actually operates. The students who settle well are almost always the ones who asked for help in the first month rather than the third.
Pick a country to see this stage's country-specific detail — costs, IELTS, documents and the funds you must show.
Students who did this
“I thought I would have to give up on it because of money. They showed me there is an honest, low-cost route into Europe if you know which door to knock on.”
“Two places told me it was impossible without IELTS. It turned out to be a question nobody had actually asked the university.”