<p>As an international student trying to get a job in the US after graduation, is it much more difficult? </p>
<p>How much harder is it for a non-US citizen to land a business or engineering job? </p>
<p>Is there a decrease in salary for internationals?</p>
<p>Is it generally not recommended that an international student major in business due to their visa status? </p>
<p>I would greatly appreciate any information on this issue especially from other international business majors who is currently working in the US, without citizenship.</p>
<p>Yes, it’s much harder to find a job if you’re an international because your employer has to file all the horrible paper work for you and pay thousands of dollars in the whole process.</p>
<p>The pay shouldn’t be lower as far as I know.</p>
<p>You cannot count on getting a job in the States after college. Even if you found an employer who would be willing to sponsor you for a visa, your visa might get rejected - there is a cap on the number of work visas, and the number of visa applications exceeds that cap by a multiple. Getting a work visa is a GAMBLE!</p>
<p>There are also some timing issues. In order to apply for a work visa, you need to have a Bachelor’s degree at the time the application is made. You HAVE to submit the application on April 15 - on the first day that applications are accepted - to have a chance for a visa at all (because of the yearly visa cap). Unfortunately, most people won’t get their degree until May. That means you will have to wait almost a full year before you may apply for a work visa.</p>
<p>Waiting a year by itself is not a problem because you have 12 months of OPT to bridge that time. But that means that you cannot use your OPT for anything else. No summer internships during college, for example. And now think: who would go through the trouble of hiring an international business major without any relevant work experience? There are plenty of American business majors who don’t need a visa, and most of them will have internship experience as well.</p>
<p>If you are set on working in the States after college, there are a couple of things you can do to improve your chances. First, you could bypass some of the timing issues by graduating a semester early or late, at the end of the fall semester. Then you would need less OPT time to bridge the gap until April, which means you could get some summer internships. Unfortunately, most of the competitive business jobs hire after the spring semester only. Secondly, you could get a graduate degree from a US college. There are additional work visas allocated to professionals with a graduate degree from a US college. There is still a cap, but the cap is not reached on the very first day of the application season. Lastly, you could major in a science or engineering. STEM majors are eligible for a 17-month OPT extension, which allows them to do internships in college and then have plenty of OPT left over to apply for a work visa. (But there’s a caveat: employers have to jump through even more hoops to hire someone on OPT extension.)</p>
<p>Long story short, make sure you have a backup plan in another part of the world. In particular, only assume as much debt for college as you could pay off with a job in your home country.</p>
<p>supposed I were to major in Computer Science in the college of engineering, which is a STEM major.</p>
<p>Could you please elaborate on the 17-month extension process and getting a working VISA (for STEM majors that is)?</p>
<p>Also, your statement on interning scared me - are you saying that all international students with a student visa cannot intern at all during their college years? As in 0? Or is it that they are able to intern but just not able to directly get a job afterwards (due to visa problems)?</p>
<p>To get the 17-month extension, you have to work in a job directly related to your STEM major and your employer has to register with some federal agency - not all employers are comfortable doing that. </p>
<p>I see that I didn’t explain the timing issue very well. Suppose you graduate and want to start working mid May. You need to bridge the time until mid April the following year with OPT before you may apply for a work visa. That means you would need 11 months of OPT to bridge the time. Since OPT is limited to 12 months, that would leave you with only a single month for internships during your college career. One month is not a lot in terms of work experience, considering that you will have three summer breaks of 4 months each. Is the issue clearer now?</p>
<p>I dont think getting the STEM extension is really hard because from my understanding the student can apply for it themselves. But in order to do this the employer has to be registered with some government service called E-Verify (I think thats the correct name). Usually, a company who agrees to hire an international will have hired foreign nationals in the past and probably would already be registered.</p>
<p>You can do an internship, but you get 1 year of work for every degree you complete, and one 17 month STEM extension. So if you do an internship for 4 months, you can work 12-4=8 months OPT.</p>
<p>You will probably find it difficuilt to find a job after your BS degree, especially in Business. Reality is such that there are hundreds of thousands of American students graduating with similar degrees who dont need any visa sponsorship who cant find work. </p>
<p>But if you had a MS or PhD in the sciences or engineering and your thesis and research area was exactly what the company was looking for, sponsorship is just a small issue to them. There is an extreme shortage of American students in this country with advanced degrees in certain disciplines, and so American educated foreign nationals are the next best thing.</p>
Yes it does - it’s called Optional Practical Training, or in short OPT. You get a total of 12 months and you may use it while you are in college or immediately after graduation. That’s the point I was getting at before. If you need to save your OPT time to bridge the time to the next H-1B season, you have barely any left for internships during college.</p>
<p>I don’t know how sure of a thing the STEM extension is. My college hires an immigration lawyer once a year who gives a presentation on job and graduate school-related visa issues. He told us not to rely on the OPT Extension because only few companies had registered. Of course, that was almost a year ago. Things changed this past September. Now all federal contractors are required to use e-verify, so a lot more companies should be registered now.</p>
<p>Our international CS majors who want to stay in the country after graduation typically do one of three things: they are lucky enough to get a job with one of the big tech companies (Microsoft, Google, …), go to graduate school, or work for the college (the work visa cap does not apply to educational institutions). If it was that easy to get a job for a smaller company, students would have probably done that before.</p>
<p>What about co-ops? Co-ops are considered under CPT (curricular practical training). Does that mean a student can participate in co-ops without exhausting the 12 month limit of OPT? Furthermore, does that mean a student can participate in co-ops and still be able to work under OPT authorization after graduation?</p>
<p>CPT does not affect your OPT eligibility as long as it is less than 12 months total. However, once you complete 12 months and 1 day of CPT, you will lose ALL of your OPT eligibility at once.</p>
<p>The thing to remember about CPT though is that it has to be an experience REQUIRED by your college to graduate. Usually this is not the case with CO-OPs. CPT is usually used when a program requires an internship or research. So in other words is has to be explicitly required by your curriculium.</p>
<p>barium, you make it sound like every international student (that have no green card) is literally doomed and have almost no choice but to either refuse internship during one’s college years or use the OPT hours and face no choice but to get deported back to one’s home country immediately. </p>
<p>I know it’s difficult for itnernational students but is it really an absolute 100% dead-end for internationals EVEN with specializations (engineering, research etc.), unless they score with an absolute powerhouse such as microsoft or google? It just seems unrealistic - if what you say is true and not exaggerated, then there seems absolutely no point for internationals to ever go to the US for undergraduate since they will all get deported back to their home countries anyway (except for those top 5% who score with a major firm).</p>
<p>You’ve stated what your international CS majors have gone after graduation. May I ask what university that is? And what about business majors from a top 10 undergraduate business school? Would even a business major from wharton or NYU stern or Ross face extreme job opportunities due to the H1B visa process?</p>
<p>Well, the thing to remember is that when you come on an F1 visa you have to intend to go back to your home country, so technically even asking the questions you are asking now shows that you misrepresented yourself to the INS to get the F1 visa.</p>
<p>Putting that aside, yes it is extremely hard for anybody with just a BS degree and no experience to get an employer to sponsor them for an H1B visa or an immigrant visa. As I mentioned before, there are hundreds of thousands of American undergraduates who have no work and need no visa sponsorship, and some of those are bound to be from top 10 universities.</p>
<p>The thing to remember about visa sponsorship is that the employer has to prove to the government that there is no American worker available to fill the job. While you may be a BS graduate from a top university, does the position really require a Harvard or Wharton graduate? Can’t it be filled by someone from a “lesser” university? If you adverstised for such a position in “this” economic climate you will most definatley get many responses from BS business graduates. Remember, its not the employer but the government that makes the rules. And it is the governments responsibility is to “protect” American workers.</p>
<p>That’s why its much easier to find a job that is willing and able to sponsor you if you have an advanced degree in a STEM discipline. Think about it, if you ran an advertistment for the labor department to prove to them that there are no American workers available, do you think you would get more responses for “job requires BS in Business and 0 years experience” or “job requires PhD in Mechanical Engineering with research experience in mechatronics and component design” ?</p>
<p>Also, the INS is indifferent to the prestige of the university where you get your degree. All they require is that the degree is from an accredited instiuition in America or from an accredited instituition abroad where the quality and scope is similar to America’s. So if you apply for an immigrant or non-immigrant visa and are required to have a degree, they don’t care if its from Harvard or from some university in India. So a business can’t hire you on the grounds that you have a degree from a certain university. They have to prove that you have the skills that they need and can’t find an American who has them. Of course you can see how this can be a problem with a BS degree and 0 years experience.</p>
<p>Oh I was ignorant about the F1 visa interpretation my bad… </p>
<p>hence to get a job in the US as an international,
business = no hope
liberal arts = no hope
engineering = no hope unless PhD or Masters with tons of exp?</p>
<p>I better start withdrawing my apps and requesting for refunds</p>
<p>University of Michigan 437
University of Illinois at Chicago 434
University of Pennsylvania 432
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine 432
University of Maryland 404
Columbia University 355
Yale University 316
Harvard University 308
Stanford University 279
University of Pittsburgh 275</p>
<p>WOW, I’m guessing that they must’ve been 99% masters and PhD students, with the remaining 1% being undergraduates recruited by Google and Microsoft?</p>
<p>Can anyone with personal experience, either of oneself or of an international friend, give us more insight into job opportunities for internationals?</p>
<p>If you want to come and study here - great. But make sure that you are informed about the immigration process. Also, make sure that no matter where you go that you always have a way to get home because there is a realistic chance, no matter where you study, that you wont be able to stay there permanently.</p>
<p>While the immigration process might seem hostile to you, you have to understand where the government is comming from - there first priority has to be to protect the 307 million Americans who already live here. Even with these hard rules, over one million people per year immigrate to America permamently. This country has over 40 million foreign born people, so obviously it can be done.</p>
<p>I would advise you before you come to consider some different paths to permanent residency, if thats your goal. This includes things like majoring in an area that’s experiencing a shortage, such as STEM, medical (like nurses) etc. Also, if you pursue a PhD you can teach at a university and you your H1B is not counted against the annual limit, which means you can get it immediatley. Schools struggle to find good professors so if you go to a top university and have good research you should get a job quiet easily if the economy is doing well at that point in time. </p>
<p>Yet another option is getting your BS here, going home and working for a few years and then getting a job here. Perhaps you can use your OPT time to get an internship, then go home and work for say 3 years and then see if the company where you had your internship wouldn’t sponsor you for permanent residency.</p>
<p>The reason I know quiet a bit about this is that I am an immgrant myself. My family moved here from the UK when I was in high school, and I find the immigration process quiet fascinating.</p>
<p>Also, dont look at the number of H1B visa’s granted per university per year. That can be very misleading. Firstly, it doesn’t mention what disciplines that those people were in. Graduate education is very specialized which means that the company will review your research area and the papers that you have published so you can’t make general statements about any specific university or discipline.</p>
but will international students likewise be disadvantaged when applying for co-ops?</p>