<p>My Junior is headed to London in a few months for Spring Semester. I'm sure I could get many answers from the correct ND website, or perhaps from a more forthcoming student, but I'll give this a shot anyway.</p>
<p>Could any parents with previous London students answer a few questions:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>How much "extra" did it cost for the semester abroad experience? I realize additional excursions would be quite variable, but can anyone ballpark this for me?</p></li>
<li><p>When and where are the gateway cities established? Shouldn't I already be booking a trip to somewhere like LA, Chicago or New York? Would that be outbound from our home to the gateway sometime like January 5th and returning from the gateway to our home sometime like May 15th?</p></li>
<li><p>How common is it for parents to visit their London students? Not sure whether this would even make sense for us, nor how happy our Junior would be to have his parents dropping in, but is it commonly done by other parents?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I'm sure I'll have more questions later, but if you could help me with these I would much appreciate it.</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>My daughter studied in London three years ago. I don’t think it was considerably more expensive; she did travel around Europe quite a bit, but on the incredibly cheap RyanAir. You might want to stock up on the basic things you’d normally think it wouldn’t be worth taking along; a bottle of shampoo, for example, costs about $25 in the UK- or it did then anyway. ND plans the itinerary; there are either two or three airports they use (my daughter went from Dulles), and I think they even book the connecting flight from your home airport. If a visa is needed (if the student will be doing paid work, say, which I think is fairly common), there’s a rather small window provided by the British consulate. My daughter had a nightmarish experience with this; she had the required biometrics scan (!) done at the Providence Homeland Security office while she was home for fall break, and later heard from the NY consulate that it hadn’t taken, so she had to have it done again AT THE SAME PLACE, or do all the paperwork, etc., over again and start from scratch at the Chicago consulate, which is what she ended up doing- getting her visa just in time for the trip. I love to hear people complain about how difficult it is to come to the US; when another daughter was studying in Florence we had to collect notarized letters from our banks and provide proof of assets and health insurance. We did plan to vist London, and I think quite a few parents do, but our trip was cancelled because of the volcanic eruption in Iceland.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info. Got a call from my Junior yesterday. Guess ND is actually still putting the finishing touches on the itineraries. Seems this year they’re flying out of JFK, or $150 extra to fly from O’Hare. Hadn’t even thought about the visa possibility. Guess we better check that out. Any advice on ATM and cell phone considerations? Thanks again.</p>
<p>The ND program provides cell phones on arrival; my daughter suspended service for her regular one. She opened a Bank of America debit account because there’s no fee when you use Barclays ATMs (the two banks apparently have an arrangement). This may have changed, but it should be easy enough to find out.</p>
<p>There are program directors who have meetings with the students and help prep them for studying abroad and to obtain a visa if one is required. I was in the same situation last year and worried about all the details,but I didn’t realize they were handling it already. Rest assured. :)</p>