<p>Does your college's international student office make your life difficult?</p>
<p>Hi everyone! I love my college but the administration really sucks, especially the international student office. Every single request you make is all about form-filling, but my biggest beef is how DIFFICULT THEY ARE ABOUT GRANTING CPT.</p>
<p>I looked very long and hard for a company that will hire international students for internship, and landed one there this summer (which means I have no legal problems working there, just some administrative hoops to jump through). I have my offer letter in hand and everything. I take it to the international office to get started on the paperwork for obtaining CPT, and they tell me the offer letter is not specific enough. I need to TROUBLE MY EMPLOYER TO WRITE A MORE DETAILED OFFER LETTER (including my job duties and a few other items) before they can grant me CPT. By 'they', I mean the international student office director dude. Sheesh.</p>
<p>Is your college's international office as difficult when it comes to authorizing you for CPT? (iirc, CPT is controlled by the school, not the federal government). </p>
<p>Or perhaps more generally, is your international office difficult and full of form-filling and paper-pushing?</p>
<p>Your international student office is just doing its job: making sure you actually qualify for CPT according to federal guidelines before granting an employment authorization. Your school could actually lose its privilege of being allowed to issue I-20s if they don’t follow protocol.</p>
<p>Consider yourself lucky that your college grants CPT at all. My undergraduate college made all students go through OPT. (Though we didn’t have any majors that required an internship in order to graduate.)</p>
<p>Internet connection ate my more detailed post, but:</p>
<p>It is very clear I am eligible for CPT. I am on an F-1 visa, have X months out of my 12 months left of CPT, and the company has no legal issues with hiring internationals.</p>
<p>Why does the international office demand such a detailed offer letter (that I will need to contact my future company to write JUST FOR ME?). It is not as though the banal details will be printed on the I-20 for this CPT (boss I will be reporting to, XYZ job duties, etc). This new hassle was introduced only this time around. Last time I did CPT, they accepted the (rather vague) offer letter, as all offer letters generally are.</p>
<p>I’m also under the impression that very few, out of the total international population at my school, international students do CPT at my school, so why make things hard on the ones that do? It’s not like they are handing out CPT endorsements like hot cakes.</p>
<p>Despite my clear frustration, I don’t intend to b***h on this lovely forum. If your school’s international office demands that you jump 10 feet while clucking like a chicken to get your travel signature, you damn well do it, no way out. I’m trying to understand how other international offices are like to folks out there. Of course some will be kinder and smoother than others. I did consider haing a polite but candid discussion with the University President (he’s the “you can approach me for anything type”) about this, but I think this will clearly do me no good. Like I say, quite few apply for CPT at my college, and the powers that be (the international office director dude) dislikes me enough. This is one officer you don’t want to mess with, he’ll make your life very difficult.</p>