The first step to studying abroad- an insight into an educational fair

I happened to go for a Education fair organized by Edwise which features universities from UK Europe Canada Australia and Singapore. The visit to the fair was quite useful in a way that I got an idea why people go to education fairs in the first place. According to me it is just meant for people who have enough money to spend and are desperate to show to progress education-wise so they tend to join colleges at random without any insight into what they are actually doing. However by accusing a certain set of people of such foolish decisions I am only referring to a particular section of students I saw at the fair. Others are parents with a mindset to get some info on how to send their children off abroad for higher education. If one wants to find the real focused student groups who have a firm resolve and purpose of going abroad to study one needs to look very closely into the crowd as this category of students would have done their research at home and shortlisted schools they would prefer to join and only attend briefings by those universities that are in their list. However the main thing was that generally the universities that come to fairs are those which are not popular names in foreign countries or those which are new to the foreign student enterprise. There are few universities that come with the intention to boost their brand image, more likely to officially sponsor the whole education fair to emphasize their purpose, one can try to apply and get through at these universities. Coming to what I learnt about universities in the U.K are that most of them require IELTS and decent academic credentials. That's it. Application processing takes a whale of a time so it is best to apply  at least 8 months in advance. Quite a lot of importance is given for good profiles with paper presentations. So I'd say don't go to a fair if you are just desperate to do something about your career because they are more likely to push you to make a decision in a matter of 3-4 hours.. that's not exactly advisable. I'd say if you feel all confused then go to some free counselling centre, I believe the counsellors at Edwise itself are quite good themselves, and sort out what you really want to do. You need to decide keeping in mind your academic background, what your field of interest is and what sort of coursework you want to study and the exposure that you want to get. Define a set of colleges that have prospective courses you can apply for and get. break into top class intitutes, gettable institutes and sure shot colleges. Go to a fair now after you have done all this and ask about how good chances are of securing admission and then apply. 

Such an effort ensures you are not stuck with a course that you had no interest in doing and to make matters worse, in another country altogether just because of a hurried decision made in a couple of hours.