My daughter chose her uni based on being able to do the year abroad. It was great motivation for her to do well because she was keen to get her first choice of uni abroad (in California)
Her uni (Swansea) have had meetings etc to help them through the process of application which has bern great. Her uni assigns them to a partner uni abroad and then they go through an application process with that uni. She got her acceptance through but it’s been fairly intense because lots of things are needed all at once with lots of deadlines all at the same time as second year final exams.
One thing which was hard was that the accommodation requires guarantee of the whole year’s rent but the student finance letter isn’t through by that point and it’s her student finance which pays for the accomodation. So that required a lot of emails back and forth.
The admin at their end wasn’t great as she’d spent ages sorting out what classes she wanted and worked out that they didn’t clash and sent over the info with all the codes but she needs pre requisite grades for some which she had (U.K. grades) but because it’s an international exchange they took some time to realise that and to take that into account. She contacted all the individual tutors but they weren’t able to help. She contacted her uni here but they’d already contacted the uni there and the uni there only finally sorted it out weeks later despite constant chasing and by that time her first choice class was full. She’s first on the waiting list now but if she wasn’t the kind of student whose really on top of everything, it could have meant she didn’t have the classes and so the whole thing would have fallen through.
A friend of hers wasn’t on top of everything and is still looking for accomodation as all the on campus accomodation is full now and they’re trying to find private rental in California which is proving to be difficult.
They’re both still getting visas sorted and are due to leave mid august
I think once they’re there it will be amazing but it’s been an experience just getting everything organised for it.
and they've just emailed to say she needs to send them her living expenses - this works out at €9500 - she gets it back on arrival but it's a nightmare. Coupled with starting a week earlier than anticipated, when we're on holiday! She can't move into her accommodation until 10 days after her arrival date 
. I'm sure it will work out OK in the end but there must be a better way of doing this