aerospace major for non-us

b_r_um
Thu, 27 Feb 2014 20:50:29 +0000

Disclaimer: the following information references current immigration policies. However, the US is in the midst of reforming their immigration system, so none of this may still be true in 4 years when you finish college.

Your F-1 student visa comes with 12 months of Optional Practical Training, which authorizes employment off campus. You can use it for internships during the summer breaks in college, or for full-time employment immediately after graduation.

If you’d like to stay in the US after college, you should save enough of your OPT to bridge the time between graduation and October 1st. That’s because “real” work visas, called H-1B, start their validity on October 1st. So, if you’d like to stay in the US between college and Oct 1, you’ll need leftover OPT to bridge the gap.

There’s one kink: there’s a cap on the yearly number of H-1B visas issued. Visa applications are accepted starting April 1, and your employer cannot submit an application for you until you receive your degree, which usually happens in May. In some years the cap is reached in the first week of April, in other years there are visas available up through December, so there’s no way to predict what will happen in the year you graduate.

If the H-1B cap has been reached when you graduate college, you cannot get a work visa up through October 1st the following year (i.e. 16 months later if you graduate in May). That sounds bad, but there’s still hope.

STEM majors (aerospace engineering among them) can apply for a 17-month OPT extension, provided their employer agrees to use E-Verify to screen all new hires. (That’s a program to check a person’s legal status in the country, making it harder for illegal immigrants to find employment.) If your employer uses it, great, you can get an additional 17 months of OPT to bridge the time until you can get a work visa the following year. If your employer does not use E-Verify, tough luck.

Foreigners who are determined to stay in the US and find themselves in this situation will usually enroll in graduate school at this point. The graduate degree makes them more employable, and when they are getting ready to start employment after graduate school, they can submit their H-1B application right on April 1st to circumvent the cap. (You need to have a Bachelor’s degree to be the beneficiary of an H-1B petition. That’s why undergraduate students have to wait until after graduation, while graduate students can have their application submitted on April 1st while they are still in school.)