I won't need a F1 visa but green card may not come in the near future since my country(India) has a long waiting list for green card. International students in the same situation, please share your experience. Does A# help the application at all? Or I am still considered as international student?
Hiya
I investigated this quite a bit, since I was not sure whether my green card would turn up before applications started. It did in the end, but the information you need is this...
You're an international student as far as the schools are concerned. It's not a matter of visa status per se, but that Legal Permanent Residents (green card holders) qualify for government loans, grants, etc. Without the green card, the medical schools can't get paid (as they see it).
Without a green card, you have to rely on either paying for it yourself (!), or getting a 3rd party loan from a major bank, usually at a higher interest rate than government loans.
The trouble is, if you get a 3rd party loan, you'll need to be able to prove to the medical schools that you can fund the full 4 years of a course. The rumour that keeps circulating, is that some schools ask you to give them the entire cost of the course up front... All $150,000-odd of it. Then it is put into escrow until it gets used up. I don't know if this is true or an urban myth; I've never met anyone who can give an answer one way or another. We're a rare breed...
Really the only thing to do is to wait for the green card, or perhaps negotiate with the medical schools that you are interested in. Unfortunately, most top-50 schools are getting many thousands of applications each year, and they don't have the resources or inclination to make exceptions for everyone. Perhaps contact them in the late fall and ask about it, when things have settled down a bit after the frenzy of the summer.
One thing that you might want to think about, however, is seeing if your green card ought to arrive long before you are meant to matriculate. In my case, my green card comes from having a American wife, and so I was having my K-1 fiance visa adjusted to a GC; it was going to happen eventually, and unless I was a criminal (I don't even know any!), they were going to have to give it to me. Legally, the government are required to sort it out within two years (in my case), after that, you can go before a judge and ask them to order the government to do their duty and attend to your case. I forget the latin name for the process, but an immigration attourney would be able to advise you. That said, out of the hundreds of K1->GC cases that I have heard of, only one ever went that far, so the chances were fairly small that I wouldn't have the green card before matriculation. YMMV.
visajourney.com is helpful in terms of working out timelines for visa awards and giving you information about how to proceed with your case.
My big advice is to make an Infopass appointment every few months (whenever a piece of paperwork turns up, or you haven't heard from them in a while) and check on the status of your case. I had lots of clerical problems that were USCIS' fault, which delayed my case by 6 months or more... Don't feel embarrassed to check up on them. If the person at the office gets annoyed at you badgering them all the time, it's their job to answer your questions, and once you have your green card, you'll never see them again.
If you need advice/need to chat, send me a private message, yeah?
🙂
International pre-medical students unite!
