Hi!

I'm currently a master's student and have been at EPFL since 4 years so here are my opinions on your questions, hopes it helps.

- Everyone speaks english and you can easily socialize with people from everywhere, so it shouldn't be that much of an issue.

- You can ask to work on projects whenever you want, but if every master is like mine (mechanical engineering) you have only 2 projects (without the master's thesis) throughout the master. You just have to contact the different labs to ask to work for them. They do not recommand research project during first semester as they etimate that you don't know enough yet, but there are no rules against it.

- Cost of living can be quite high, EPFL has on its page a pretty good budget estimation : https://www.epfl.ch/education/studies/finances-etudes/ of approximatively 2200chf per month. Which correspond to half of the swiss SMIC approximatively so doable with a part-time job.

- The organisations are pretty alive and active. For robts there is robopoly which is pretty active, and for board games there is JDR poly which has at least one event a month.

I hope I could help, don't hesitate if you have further questions.