Now obviously this will vary uni by uni so I can only talk about my experience at Glasgow uni although I'm sure there will be similarities.
I decided to apply for a year abroad quite suddenly to be honest, I had thought about one before coming to uni but it never re-crossed my mind until my lecturer suddenly mentioned that she was the person who we would need to contact if we were planning one. After an evening where I didn't do any work and instead just searched all the pages I had decided I wanted to do it. Then came the tricky process of applying.
In order to apply I had to fill in a form with references from two lecturers, a personal statement, my choice of universities (minimum 3, maximum 5) and the courses I would take if I went there (we have to do a full course load over there and it must be approved by our subject so there will be no clash in our final year). It took me a very long time and a whole lot of emails between myself and multiple different people in my subject in order to get everything finalised. In comparison, the personal statement was easy especially as we were given the scheme of how they would mark it and what they were looking for.
One of the funnest parts of the applications was looking at all the universities we were paired with and deciding if I'd want to go there (this also involved watching a lot of lipdubs and random videos on youtube about them)! I had already decided I wanted to go to an English speaking country, not really for any particular reason but I guess I didn't want to learn another language. I also didn't want to go to a southern hemisphere university as I don't like the term times there, plus as I have already travelled round a lot of Australia I would feel like I wasn't maximising my year as I'd be going to places I'd been before. So this pretty much left me with USA and Canada. While I did look at American universities none of them had very good linguistics courses and in fact it was pretty impossible to find a full course load for linguistics. Also, while this may not matter and I would have been fine, the drinking age being 21 in the States could put people some people off.
In the end I applied for UBC (looked like a fantastic uni), Toronto (had amazing courses) and Calgary (perfect combination of courses/uni and being close to the mountains). After handing in my application there was the nervous wait to hear about whether we had got in and if so where. Unfortunately the offers were given out slightly staggered, so while some people got them at 9am on Thursday, I didn't get mine till 4pmish on the Friday, and others had to wait the weekend. Horrific does not cover the tension that was felt! When I got the email and saw I was going to Calgary I just sat in shock till my flatmate burst into my room asking if I'd heard yet! And then was the lengthy process of texting/calling everyone who needed to be informed and updating facebook. (Over 50 likes later I started to get a bit paranoid that perhaps people were liking it because it meant I would be out of the country, but hopefully at least the majority will be sad to see me go!)
So that is the application process up until the offer, I'll cover the next things that are necessary in my next blog. Hope this helps and please do feel free to ask if there's any points you want clarified.
