Apply and get your admission letter

Your admission letter (Zulassungsbescheid) is the document your visa application is built on.

The typical flow:

1. Prepare certified copies and certified translations of your school/degree certificates.
2. If your country requires it, get your APS certificate first (India, China, Vietnam among others — the APS checks your documents are genuine and takes several weeks).
3. Apply via uni-assist or directly to the university (check each programme page). uni-assist charges a handling fee of €75 for the first application per semester and €30 for each additional one; some universities instead need a uni-assist VPD (preliminary review document) plus a direct application.
4. Pay the fees and wait — processing takes weeks, especially around deadlines. Applications count only when complete and received, not when sent.

While you wait, don't idle: this is the perfect window to research housing, compare health insurers and gather your visa documents (next steps). The gap between admission and semester start is often only 6–10 weeks — everything in the Prepare phase has to happen inside it.

If you get a conditional admission, read the conditions carefully — some require a language test or an aptitude test (Feststellungsprüfung) after arrival, and unmet conditions surface at enrolment, when it's too late to fix them from Germany.

Red flags:

• Deadlines are hard cutoffs. A document arriving a day late rolls you to the next semester — and your visa timeline with it.
• Fake or "arranged" admission letters from agents: universities confirm admissions to embassies, and forgeries surface exactly there, ending in a ban.
• Paying an agent large fees for what DAAD and uni-assist publish for free. Help with paperwork is legitimate; "special access" is not.
• Ignoring the university's stated document format rules (certified copies, envelope rules, online-only) — format errors are the most common rejection reason at uni-assist.