getting your j-1 intern visa

posted sep 2023

I recently got the opportunity to intern in the United States on a J-1 visa, but I couldn’t find any guides / data points on the administrivia required to get that visa that were comprehensive enough for my liking.

This series of posts attempt to fill that gap for future fellow overplanners.

TL;DR: Detailed Timeline

Context

These experiences can vary widely depending on one’s background and situation. I believe the following attributes likely influenced the outcome and timeline of my J-1 Intern Visa Application.

This guide is going to be written catering to people who are exactly like me, but I think most of this stuff will translate to other schools and nationalities.

The J-1 Intern Visa Journey

0. Accept Internship Offer

Congratulations! You’ve done the hard part. No more Collecting Rainwaters or House Robber IIs from here on out, but stay on the ball. You should prompt your HR team to contact the J-1 sponsor (probably Cultural Vistas) to initiate the J-1 visa application process 2-3 months before your start date.

1. Cultural Vistas Initial Request Form

Once initial contact with Cultural Vistas has been made, the host and participant will be instructed to complete a basic request form before receiving the actual sponsorship application form.

This will be relatively simple for you to complete. However, you will need:

Additionally, you must decide if you want:

You (or the company) will only pay for any of this later in the process, when you receive your sponsorship approval decision.

At one point, I had to be granted “edit access” to the form to re-enter a specific piece of information because the person at my host company handling my visa left the company. There, I noticed that some fields were edited by Cultural Vistas, including weird things like making “Rui” my middle name (“Kok Rui” is my first name, I have no middle name). If you encounter the same thing, don’t worry – they’re just little quirks of the form that Cultural Vistas will settle in the end.

2. Cultural Vistas Official Application Form

Once the request has been approved, the host and participant will complete a more detailed sponsorship application form. This form is used by Cultural Vistas to decide if they should sponsor your application for a J-1 Intern visa.

On top of standard biodata, you will need to submit the following documents:

There are also 4 essay questions, each with a 200 word limit.

Take these questions semi-seriously – there are anecdotes online where applicants were rejected because of their answers. Read up about the J-1 Visa, in particular about how it’s a non-immigrant visa for you to attend a cultural exchange, not a stepping stone for you to eventually move / work in the US or whatever. (Note: I am not an immigration lawyer, this is not legal advice, I could be wrong).

Both you and the host company must submit completed applications before the 20-day (or 5-day if you paid for expedited processing) approval countdown commences.

3. Sponsorship Approval & DS-2019

Once your application is approved, you and the host company will receive an email stating that there are 2 steps to complete before your DS-2019 is issued.

Firstly, you will be issued an invoice that you can pay for with a credit and debit card. This will involve all charges that your company chose not to cover. I paid for expedited processing and insurance, and the payment went through instantly and painlessly.

Secondly, you will receive a Form DS-7002 Training Plan to sign with DocuSign. Both you AND your workplace supervisor must sign this DS-7002 to proceed. This workplace supervisor is your mentor or manager at work (and NOT HR/recruiting), and as (probably) engineers who are (probably) busy with their normal engineering duties, they may miss the email or otherwise be unfamiliar with what it is. It is crucial that you reach out to your supervisor and ideally communicate to them that they have to do this early – tough luck if they’re on an extended holiday or something when the DocuSign is sent out. My process was delayed here by a week because I didn’t ping my supervisor till then, and I know of others who were delayed by more than 2 weeks.

If you want to change the address to which the physical Form DS-2019 will be mailed to, now is the time to let Cultural Vistas know.

Once this is done, you will receive an email with your SEVIS receipt, and your Form DS-2019 will be mailed to you with FedEx International Priority.

4. DS-160 and USTravelDocs Forms

The SEVIS receipt will contain a Program Number (looks something like P123456). This is enough to proceed, even if you have not received your physical Form DS-2019 in the mail yet.

You should first complete the Form DS-160. This will take a while and is very boring, especially if you happened to have travelled to >20 countries in the past 5 years (which you’ll have to enter one-by-one through a very clunky UI). You will also need a softcopy picture of yourself ready. You can submit the Form DS-160 as many times as you want (you’ll get a fresh confirmation number each time) – I actually submitted it twice because the first time I didn’t notice that you can’t have glasses in the picture.

Once you’ve gotten your Form DS-160 Confirmation Number (looks something like AA00ABC123), you next go to US Travel Docs to register with the US Consulate in Singapore. The form is much shorter, but the Payment process for embassy fees is incredibly frustrating. The TL;DR is that once you pay, you’ll have to wait until 5pm of the next working day before your payment gets “activated” and you can start booking interview appointment slots or getting your Interview Waiver document. However, this sometimes just fails and you’ll need to contact chat support to get it activated. Coincidentally (or not), chat support ends at 5pm each day.

As part of the USTravelDocs form, your answers to certain questions will automatically determine your eligibility for the Interview Waiver Programme. At the time of writing, until 31 December 2023, as long as you have EVER travelled to the US for ANY REASON (including tourist) and you have not changed your nationality / citizenship, you are eligible for an Interview Waiver. Past 31 December 2023, I believe the normal rule is that you must have been to the US on the same Visa Class.

5A. Visa Interview (things I know)

While I ended up not doing a Visa Interview, you can check Interview Appointment wait times at https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/visa-information-resources/wait-times.html. Once you’ve completed the USTravelDocs form, even before payment activation you’ll be able to see the next earliest interview date. Sometimes, slots randomly open up (reminiscent of driving centre lesson slots) so it’s worth refreshing once in a while (or botting this).

The interview is held at the US Embassy, and takes only a few minutes. Your number gets called and you walk up to a booth (think polyclinics or pharmacies) where you show your documents and answer questions. Because of how it’s not an enclosed booth, you can listen in on others’ interviews as well.

5B. US Consulate Visa Documents Drop-Off

If you are eligible for the Interview Waiver, you can directly drop-off your documents at this place in Chinatown called “Aramex / Bstone Travel”, which is a random package tour travel agency that also happens to be designated by the US Consulate to handle visa logistics for them.

The documents you need to submit are:

One thing you should note is that Aramex / Bstone Travel is in People’s Park Complex, which is a massive old shopping mall which has a reputation of some rather interesting tenants. I didn’t realise this and just walked in expecting to find Aramex soon enough, while also looking for photo shops I could use within the mall. I ended up getting lost, walked around for over 30 minutes, and by virtue of being occasionally hounded I can now confirm the presence of the aforementioned interesting tenants.

To save you from a similar fate, here’s a video I took which shows you how to get from Chinatown MRT Exit D to Aramex / Bstone Travel in literally 10 seconds 🤡.

Since I did not have a picture of myself, I counted on the fact that there would be a photo shop somewhere in the vicinity where I could get a picture taken. I found and used Kim Tian Colour Centre, which is a 5 minute walk from People’s Park Centre and got my pictures taken, edited, and printed in 15 minutes. They seemed experienced with US Visa pictures (e.g. made sure I removed my glasses).

6. Visa + Passport Pickup

After around a week, you’ll get an SMS stating that you can pick up your passport! The procedure is the same as the Visa Documents Drop-Off – just bring your NRIC (I used SingPass app) and show it to the person at the counter, and you’ll receive an envelope with all your documents back and your passport which now has a fresh new J-1 Visa page 😄

You can also opt to get it delivered to you, which is helpful if you aren’t able to go to Aramex during their opening hours (I had to take leave from my internship to do it).