London, Paris, Fairbanks
So the visa interview at the US embassy in London is behind me.
Short version: Everything went smoothly and my visa was granted - yay! I’ll get my passport (with visa inside) and paperwork back via courier service within a week or so.
Long version: I found it good to read of other people’s experiences, so here is mine.
My appointment was for the late morning (10:30 am), and the instructions had many warnings against arriving more than 30 min before the set time. Therefore, I arrived with 10-15 min to spare, only to find at least 30-45 min worth of queue labeled “visa” in front of the building. Yikes! There had also been warnings not to arrive more than 30 min late, otherwise you wouldn’t be seen by the consular officer. After briefly panicking a little bit, I realised there wasn’t much I could do at this stage, calmed down and went with the flow.
The queue moved jerkily. There was a first paper-checking station, and then a second person who would inspect the paperwork again and direct US citizens to an entry pavilion to the left and the bulk of us visa applicants to an identical pavilion on to the right. No electronic devices were allowed, so I had come with no way to track time. I should have brought a regular wrist watch, which was allowed. The irregular movement of the queue was partly caused by people being sent back because of paperwork not checking out, people with too bulky bags that required inspecting, mobile phones and other forbidden items being discovered, fractious children that needed to be caught, and sometimes no visible reason at all. Once arrived at the front, we were ushered in sets of four into the entry pavilion, where we underwent an airport-TSA-like inspection. Except that the airport experience is smoother. There was a lot of “step over here now, please”, “is this your bag?”, “no, don’t take it, please step over HERE now” and so forth. Our group of four was only allowed to leave the pavilion on the other side of the fence once everyone had passed muster, and one person’s metal make-up case caused another small wait.
From there everything went as expected: Walk around the side of the building to the entrance desk, get checked in via the barcode on the appointment letter, receive several copies of your number, sit down in the waiting room and wait. From the screens, it became clear that at least four separate queues were going on: A common one for the initial paperwork collection and fingerprinting at approx. 10 desks along the side of the room, and several queues at desks and offices at the end of a hallway off the main room for the actual interviews. The second wait seemed longer, but that was maybe because the book I had brought was one I had already read (dang!), or because the screens needed to be watched, as several queues were serving numbers that had come in after mine.
The interview itself was short - 2 min maximum. The consular officer, a friendly and businesslike woman, asked me to describe the project I would be working on and how it was funded. She even made a remark that doing atmospheric research in the Arctic sounded cool, or cold, all the while typing what I was saying. My visa is a J-1 “research scholar” visa of the type usually issued to postdocs and doctoral students, so that led to some questions about my professional path. The only slightly dicey question was about what I planned to do after the project finished, and I said that as this was a return to research after 6 years in commercial software, I couldn’t say with certainty, but planned to stay in research — which is completely true. There were no questions about my family, living arrangements or personal funds.
After I was told “the visa is granted”, there was a last step to drop off a tracking sheet with my address at the courier service (and pay the fee). All the paperwork stayed at the embassy and will be sent to me once the visa is affixed into my passport.
The entire process took a little over 3h.
I’m on my way!
