How Easy It Is to Get Home Should Factor Into Your University List

Most IMAT shortlists get built around tuition, ranking, and which city sounds most appealing. One factor that quietly matters just as much gets skipped almost every time: how long and how expensive it actually is to get home from that university, and how often you'll realistically be able to do it.

Why this matters more than it seems to upfront

Six years is a long commitment, and across that time you'll want to get home for holidays, family events, a hard week, or just to recharge. A university an hour from a major airport with direct flights to your country is a completely different lived experience from one that requires two trains and a layover to reach the same place. The distance on a map can be similar. The actual friction of doing it four or five times a year is not.

What actually varies between university towns

Some Italian cities tied to IMAT seats sit right next to international airports with frequent, direct, relatively cheap routes. Others are a deliberate regional train ride away from the nearest major hub, which adds hours and cost to every single trip. It's worth checking, specifically, what the realistic door-to-door travel time back to your home city looks like, not just whether the university has an airport "nearby" in the loosest sense.

The tradeoff isn't as simple as "closer is better"

A smaller, harder-to-reach university town often comes with lower living costs and a tighter, less distracting student environment, while an easy-to-fly-from city can mean paying more for daily life. Neither side is automatically right. The point isn't to chase convenience above everything else, it's to actually weigh travel friction as a real cost alongside tuition and rent, instead of discovering it the hard way after you've already committed six years to a place.

How to weigh it without overcorrecting

Look up actual routes and realistic travel times to your specific home city for every university still on your list, not a general sense of "Italy is close to everywhere." Then decide how much that number should move your ranking. For some candidates it will barely matter. For others, especially if going home regularly matters to you or your family, it's reasonable for it to shift a university up or down your preference list.

Your university list should reflect what your actual six years will look like, not just what looks good on paper. Travel friction is a real, recurring part of that life. It deserves a line on the list, even if it's rarely the deciding one.