Enrolling through agents - BLCU December 2008

[ocboy]

Hi,

I'm thinking of enrolling for the BLCU 5-week course that starts in December 2008. Have a couple of questions if people are kind enough to help with. Has anyone used the services of agents such as China Unipath or China Study Abroad to register for their courses before, if yes, please let me know what you think about their service?

As I have yet to register for the course, I am afraid that I won't be able to register in time if I did it on my own, hence my wanting to go through an agency.

Also, I am thinking of arriving before the program start and plan to take a week or two of lessons, any good programs or private schools to recommend?

Thanks heaps everybody.

Cheers,

Bernard

[davidj]

Things may be more difficult for somewhere big like BLCU, but I had some bad experiences with agencies when I tried to get three weeks of one to one tuition, four years ago.

The first agency I found was UK based and did language holidays in various countries. They arranged with a private school, but when I came to get a visa I discovered I needed an F visa and appropriate paperwork. The school wasn't prepared to provide the paperwork. Fortunately, I managed to get a refund, even though they first suggested going in on an L.

It was getting late, and I found a China based agency. They failed to find anyone that could do the paperwork in time. Whilst they were doing that, I started looking in more depth and discovered that one could do things much cheaper by going direct. I'm not sure if the agency offered the L visa tactic, but I decided to drop them and made a direct contact with a .edu.cn, in Wang Jing, that I'd found. It turned out that, if I moved quickly, they could get the paperwork and fax it to me in time to get the F visa. Although I have nothing to compare it with, I was quite satisfied. I think I was slightly lucky in catching them at the right point in the cycle for putting a batch of paperwork through with the authorities.

The China based agency did quite a hard sell over email, and were selling the services of somewhere to meet other students, amongst other services, as part of their offering, which wasn't really much use to me on such a short course.