VISA – Everywhere you want to be, the application

One of the biggest obstacles to moving to Scotland was obtaining a UK Visa.  There are various kinds of UK visas you can apply for.  Settlement, skilled worker, prospective student and student are the most common.  I had to apply for a “Tier 4 Student Visa”.  It is considered a points based visa.  You need 40 points to apply under this visa category.  30 of those points are obtained from receiving a “CAS” letter (Confirmation of Acceptance of Studies) from your chosen university and the other 10 points is proving that you have the money to support yourself without resorting to public funds.

Part of the visa process is travelling to the nearest World Bridge office to have my biometrics taken.  The nearest one for me was 5 hours away at the Eaton Center in Toronto.  They call having my fingerprints taken as well as what was referred to as a facial scan as biometrics.  It wasn’t just my finger prints though, they copy your whole finger almost right to your palm.

They required a great deal of paperwork in the application process.

• the general application
• the original CAS
• any of the original documentation (transcripts) that you send to the university that they based your admittance on.  I had to submit my college transcript and my university transcript.
• original bank statements from any account that you were using to prove you had the funds.
• original loan letter from the bank
• a passport photo
• your actual passport

You have to submit all of the above (plus anything I have forgotten to include) as well as photocopies of all of it. 

The purpose of the bank statements is to prove that you have the funds to pay your tuition (£22,200) for a year as well as “maintenance funds”.  Maintenance funds are living expenses for the length of your program or 9 months, whichever is longer.  Since I was going to be living outside of the city of London this amount was £600 / month.

That catch though is that the funds have to be in your account for 28 consecutive days prior to you submitting the account statements.  With my loan letter and my bank account statements counting in the current currency conversion I had only about 200 dollars extra.  An amount that could quickly disappear if the pound-dollar conversion changed much more.  I easily had that much money from the sale of my house but it had not been in my account for 28 consecutive days.

I submitted my documents and included proof of my house purchase three years ago as well as the sale of it, just in case.  I’ll never know if it had any affect or not.

But I can happily report, I received my passport with attached visa in it today.  :)