Visa Liveblog

Earlier this week I got an e-mail from the study abroad office telling me:

I have received your offer letters from Nottingham and I have left them in our front desk rsity office (103 Hatcher Hall) under your name for you to pick them up.
This letter has important information concerning your exchange at Nottingham, arrival date, visa info, etc. so please be sure to pick it up.

So today I took off of work, drove for an hour and a half to go back to my school, I picked up the letter from the office, and drove for an hour and a half back. At first I was very confused about how any of this information would be helpful or why it was worth the three hours driving, but here it is anyway: 

          Dear Julia

Student Name: Julia                                                                            Date of Birth: 14/06/1993

Student Number: 00000000000                                                             Nationality: American

I am pleased to inform you that your application for admission as a full-time university level undergraduate level International Exchange student at The University of Nottingham, UK from 24/09/2012 to 21/06/2013 has been accepted. The details of your acceptance are set out below. Any conditions must be satisfied prior to admission.

If you are beginning your studies in September for the start of the autumn semester, the University recommends that you arrive in Nottingham on Tuesday 18th September 2012 to attend the student Welcome Programme. The compulsory University orientation meeting will take place on Wednesday 19th September 2012. 

(Information that does not apply to me.)  

 Students joining the University for longer than 6 months will have been provided with details relating to their Tier 4 visa application. Information on this can be found online at: www.nottingham.ac.uk/internationaloffice/offer-holders/preparing/index.aspx#visa

(more information that does not apply)

We look forward to welcoming you to Nottingham!

Yours sincerely
B.
Study Abroad & Exchange Co-ordinator 

 Programme: Undergraduate programmme (no qualification)Tuition Fee: 0.00Conditions: N/A Method of Study:Full time Start Date: 24/09/2012 End Date:  21/06/2013

So now, I leave in less than three* months and I have all of the information I need for my visa (i.e. the stuff in bold, plus a couple of extra things I don't feel comfortable posting online), so I can officially apply for it! Since I hear the process is pretty frustrating, it'll no doubt be boring, and I need to tell you about it anyway, I've decided to liveblog it.


11:03PM CST: Reads this powerpoint.
11:06PM CST: Realizes links on site no longer work. 
11:07PM CST: Begins rereading powerpoint.
11:08PM CST: Disregards the powerpoint. 
11:08PM CST: Just goes straight to this site: http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/
11:10PM CST: Reads this and realizes I'm not actually going to be able to liveblog this entire thing:

Before you apply

Before you apply, you must:

• prepare the supporting documents that you will need;
• be ready to enrol your fingerprints and photograph (known as biometric information) at one of the Application Support Centers run by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (unless you are exempt from this requirement); and
• be ready to send your valid original passport or travel document and supporting documents to the UK Border Agency in New York, USA.

11:15PM CST: It keeps telling me to apply online... but won't tell me where I need to apply.
11:17PM CST: Ah-ha! I found the online application link snuggled in the corner of the page!
11:18PM CST: I wonder where my passport is. The page says I need it for this.
11:20PM CST: And it says I need to pay on this page as well.
11:21PM CST: I am very worried about clicking the 'continue' button. Maybe I can find a fake one to fill out and save on my computer for tomorrow?
11:26PM CST: Curls up on couch for a few minutes and daydreams about meeting a guy who looks like Aaron Johnson before he dyed his hair blond. 
11:29PM CST: Wonders if that last thing was appropriate for this liveblog. 
11:31PM CST: Stares at 'continue' button. Wonders where my passport is.
11:33PM CST: What do they mean by 'travel itinerary?'
11:34PM CST: I'm feeling very unsure about this whole thing.
11:35PM CST: Pauses "My Yard Goes Disney" to hunt for my passport. 
11:42:PM CST: Finds passport. Considers the tragedy that is Aaron Johnson's blond hair.
11:44PM CST: Did you know US passports feature inspirational(??) quotes on each page?

We send thanks to all the Animal life in the world. They have so many things to teach us as people. We are glad they are still here and hope they will always be so. -Excerpt from the Thanksgiving address
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. -George Washington
This is a new nation, based on a mighty continent, of boundless possibilities. -Theodore Roosevelt 

11:53PM CST: Presses the "continue" button.
11:55PM CST: I really hope this is the right application.
11:57PM CST: So far, all of the questions are about where I'm from. This isn't too scary at all.
11:58PM CST:  Oh gosh. So many types of Tier 4 visas. I'm a Tier 4(General) Student? I think?
11:59PM CST: OHMYGOD! I DON'T KNOW WHAT A POINT BASED SYSTEM IS!
12:03AM CST: Okay, I rechecked the Nottingham website and they say I need to apply for the PBS Tier 4 (General) Student visa. Everything's under control.
12:05AM CST: Section 1 is called "About You"
12:07AM CST: I don't think I'm allowed to put "New Orleans" as my place of birth as I was technically born about 15 feet outside of the city.
12:08AM CST: This all makes me very uncomfortable. What if I make a mistake and they say I lied on my application and they ban me from the U.K. for 10 years.
12:10AM CST: Now we're on to section 2- "Passport Information," which I can fill out as I have my inspirational(??) passport on hand.
12:12AM CST: I look like a drug addict in my passport photo.
12:15AM CST: I don't know whether or not my passport was issued in New Orleans or Baton Rouge.
12:16AM CST: Googles 'where was my passport issued USA' which apparently has been googled many times before.
12:21AM CST: Apparently no one knows the answer.
12:32AM CST: Even though they ask for a place of issue with the city included, I don't know where it was issued, so I'm not putting one. I refuse to be banned from the UK for ten years for lying.
12:34AM CST: "Section 3- Your Contact Details" 
12:35AM CST: "How long have you lived at this address?" "State number of months and years?" Is "sixteenish, I think" an applicable answer?
12:38AM CST: I give up for the night. I'm saving the application until morning, when I will get my mom to help. She is good at that sort of thing as it is part of her job.

June 23, 2012
8:05AM CST: My mom and I finished the online application, but a few weeks ago, I got my first speeding ticket ever and my mom didn't want to pay it right away and my court date isn't until August, so on the question asking if I was being tried on criminal charges and had an upcoming court date (including traffic violations) I had to answer yes. It shouldn't affect my visa, but it's still not the best thing to have on your record when you're applying to live in another country, so on Monday my mom and I are going to the rinky dink town where I got the speeding ticket and submitting an appeal to have my ticket pardoned. My mom says that since I'm an honor student, it's my first ticket, and I'm apply for the visa, if the judge is in a good mood, my ticket should be pardoned, and hopefully we'll be able to kill two birds with one stone.
Also, my mom said not to worry about the city for the issuing question or the months for the home address question, so we breezed through everything.

I'm going to post my post-court visit visa application separately, so that's it for this post!

Aren't visas fun? Aren't they?


To be continued.



*<3

Ahh!

Full name: Miss Julia Jorgenson  

Dear Julia,

Student ID number: 0000000000 

School/Department at the University of Nottingham: English Studies 

Study period: Full Academic Year  

Thank you for applying to study abroad at the University of Nottingham! We have now processed your application and you have been accepted by the University of Nottingham for the above study period.  Your University of Nottingham Student ID number is indicated above.  A hard copy of your offer letter will be sent to your home University. If you are applying independently this will be sent directly to your home address.

AHH!!!!!!
AHHHHHH!!!

My official acceptance letter is here!
It was longer than this, but the following ten paragraphs were all instructions for VISA applications and accommodation. (Which later posts will go over in full.)
Also noted was that I had to be in Nottingham by the 18th of September and that they had a chartered bus that would pick me up from Heathrow, but I'm going to try to convince my parents that I should spend a few days in London beforehand. (The British Museum has been calling to me in my sleep. I will return to you, my love!)

I would continue screaming, but today's my last day at the beach so I'm going to go develop my sunburn more. I just haven't reached that boiled lobster look yet.

Okay, just one last little scream. (ah!)

Love at first sight

Regards,
Julia

An abundance of e-mails

What? One day later and I'm already back?

That's because last night I got two e-mails. Two! We're on a roll!

The first was about my Nottingham I.D. card. They sent an URGENT email URGENTLY asking me to send in  a photo for my I.D. So even though they still haven't officially accepted me, I took this one and sent it on in.

Quite possibly the best I.D. photo I've ever taken. 

I know it's a very small thing, but it means I'm one step closer to going abroad. And every step counts.

Plus, I.D.s are the pinnacle of officiality. You're asked for your I.D. for everything from getting into clubs to being allowed to drive to *cough* *cough* travelling abroad. In movies FBI agents flash their I.D.s to prove they're, well, FBI agents.

My Nottingham I.D., along with allowing me to check out books from the library, is going to officially identify me as a Nottingham student, and that is beyond exciting.

The second e-mail came from one of the girls going to Nottingham with me. For the sake of this blog, I'll just call her C. C sent me a slightly frantic e-mail about visas. The visa application looks like it might rival concurrent enrollment in complexity. No, nothing can rival concurrent enrollment, but the visa application looks a little confusing nonetheless.

That, however, has to wait until next month, because if you apply for a visa more than three months before you're departure, it won't process.

I'll be back with more news as soon as I get any.

Regards,
Julia

The Evils of Concurrent Enrollment

School's out. The next time I take an exam or write an essay, I'll be in England. It still feels unreal.

So I know I'm about two months late in my posting, but things got complicated. How complicated? You ask. Actually, not that complicated. I, however, am an extraordinarily pessimistic person. I'm not going to be convinced I'm actually going until I'm half way across the Atlantic. Even then, I'll probably be thinking that there's still a chance that the plane will crash or I'll get to the school and they'll have lost all of my paperwork or my VISA will be voided or the zombie apocalypse will occur and all immigrants will be deported (that's always what happens in apocalypse movies, right?).

So in March we had our meeting, but I didn't write about it because it was about concurrent enrollment. Concurrent enrollment, y'all, is a mighty fierce bitch. In order for all of my credits to transfer and for me to keep my scholarships, I have to get all of my courses to be approved by LSU.

The steps:

1. Choose your courses.
It seems easy enough, but my school has limited courses available for JYA (Junior Year Abroad) English majors and I have to find courses that fit into my requirements at LSU.

2. Get a PACE form.
Programs Abroad Course Evaluation. This is the form that will be filled out in all subsequent steps. On it, you declare what courses you've chosen, the equivalent courses at your home school, the amount of hours you'll be taking at your host school, how those hours will transfer to your home school, and whether or not you'll be taking your courses pass/fail (I have an A average at the moment and the course structure in England is totally different, so yes, please). The following steps note the process of filling it out.

2. Get a study abroad counselor to approve and find equivalencies for said courses.
I had never, ever spoken to an English department counselor, so I had to first set up a dialogue with him, explain my goals and what I was doing and blah blah blah and then set up a meeting to work on the equivalencies. These meetings were an hour and a half of scanning the course descriptions at LSU and trying to match the course descriptions for Nottingham. The types of courses offered are dramatically different, though. If I tried to take two Viking mythology courses at Nottingham, that would be a problem because, while Nottingham offered six distinct  Viking mythology courses, LSU only offered one.
In my first meeting, I got a handful of courses approved, however, some weren't and these "some" were extremely important to the balanced schedule I created using a very small sample of course offerings. So after three hours of research and resetting my schedule, I set up another meeting with my counselor. After another couple of hours of scanning through the courses and setting up equivalences and a lot of me using the phrase "but they're close enough, aren't they?" We finally got my schedule approved for LSU and he signed my PACE form.

3. Get the Dean to approve said courses.
My friend going through the same thing had a simpler time doing this. She set up a meeting with her college's dean, they spent an hour looking through everything, and everything was approved. I emailed the dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences a few days after I'd finished getting my courses approved by my counselor. Then I waited. And waited. And never got a reply. A few weeks later, I went to the dean's office and they told me that the dean does not approve the PACE form. I have to bring it to the HSS Student Services office and they send it to someone else to be approved. Two weeks later, they had me come in and sign some paperwork. At the moment, they still have the form and once I go back to campus in a few weeks, I'll go back to the office and make sure it'll get to the next step (which I'm assuming they've done as I haven't heard from them since).

4. Send your PACE over to the Office of Admissions
Here, the admissions people formally decide how many hours you'll be given credit for and add everything to the system for future reference. Now, your PACE is complete unless...

PLOT TWIST
Oh no! You've gotten to your host university and the courses have changed! You can't take the courses on your PACE form! Now, you have to fill out another form, send it over to your counselor and apply for credit for your new courses, but more on this (if neccessary) later.

The PACE process made me nervous enough. BUT, during this time I was also told that I needed to officially apply to my host university. In early April, I was emailed the application and filled it out. It was your run of the mill, birthday, parents' names and contact numbers, address, passport number application. Plus, a list of your requested courses. I filled it out...  and then I waited. And waited. And waited. Each day, I got more and more nervous. What if they denied my application? What if they forgot about me? I started getting nervous about not renewing the lease to my apartment and having to tell everyone that, actually, I would be staying in Louisiana next year. Like I said, I'm pessimistic. I couldn't make any arrangements for the next year of my life, which was fast approaching, until they replied.

Finally, yesterday, I got an email. It'd been forwarded from my study abroad adviser from the one in England and it read:

I hope this email finds you well. I am pleased to be able to accept three students to study at Nottingham during the coming academic year. With regards to any student who has noted English modules as ever if you could please make them aware that courses are limited and we will be in touch that would be appreciated.

We will be in touch with all students directly with regards to Nottingham ID numbers, accommodation, arrival in Nottingham and various other pieces of information in the coming weeks. Offer letters will then follow the acceptance email.

Today, I woke up a little after noon.  I'd woken up for a couple of minutes at 8:30, then at 9, and 10, and 11:15. I'd had plans for the morning. I was going to go get some coffee and go on a stroll around my neighborhood for the first time in months. But I let my day wait, because, my worries subsided, I was dreaming of England.

I'll be back for another update "directly."

Regards,
Julia

The Beginning

Adventures begin the moment we leave. They begin when we leave our houses, our neighborhood, our cities, and countries. When we leave our families and our friends. We find them, to be more precise, as we walk away from where (or whom) we are comfortable and all of those ideas, places, and people that we refer to as home. Once you've left, you won't fight dragons or find treasure maps. But after taking that step, you've opened yourself up to all sorts of marvelous adventures, as minute or grand as they may turn out.

This is not to say it's impossible to have an adventure in your own city or backyard or even in your own room. So long as you find yourself staring down the unfamiliar, whatever form it takes, and running after it, an adventure is to be had anywhere. Well readers, I'm tying the laces on my running shoes. My "where," however, is slightly further than my backyard. About 4.5 thousand miles more.

This blog will document my year studying abroad in England. I'll update it as often as possible with thoughts on the experience, tips, pictures, and stories about the adventures I have. By the year's end, I hope it'll be two things: 1.) A full account of my trip for myself to look back on and my friends and family to have kept up with. 2.) A sort of guide for other students studying or planning to study abroad.

First things first, an introduction:

My name is Julia Jorgenson and I'm currently 18 years old and a sort-of freshman at university in Louisiana, where I was born and raised. When I was little I read all sorts of stories about adventures and decided I wanted to become a pirate. Discovering that piracy actually has little to do with treasure maps and more to do with theft and murder, I decided I would just write about them instead. Now, I'm studying creative writing with the goal of becoming a novelist.

My favorite authors include J.K. Rowling, Jane Austen, and Maureen Johnson-- all of whom probably had some influence on my decision to study abroad, but none more than Maureen Johnson. Her book 13 Little Blue Envelopes, which I've read too many times to count, has nested so far into my subconscious over the years, that sometimes it seems to do my thinking for me.

Last fall, I began university with the intention of only staying here for a year. I began researching programs and schools barely days after school had begun. In December, I applied to my school's bi-lateral program.* Last Tuesday, after months of waiting, I found out that I'd been accepted to the program to study at the University of Nottingham.

Now, there are six months until my adventures begin. It seems like a long time, but there's a lot to do, all of which-- so long as it's interesting-- I'll keep you up to date on.

*A later post will be dedicated entirely to explaining how this program (which most schools offer) works.