<p>Ooh, Australia, my sister lives there. Also moving there after college will sure give mum a heart attack lol. I heard Canada was really nice, too. I don’t understand why the US is so hellbent on keeping their trained internationals out of the country.</p>
<p>Because there’s a significant number of unemployed American college graduates who are first in line for jobs. If you have skills in demand on the job market, there is probably a visa for you. If you are just competing for entry-level positions, good luck…</p>
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But it would make family reunions so much easier!</p>
<p>Haha, definitely! </p>
<p>Well, you’re clearly right about the unemployment thing, now that I think about it, my confusion was just plain stupid.
I’ll just have to hope that someone is looking to hire a freshly graduated international astrophysicist or heck knows what I’ll settle on.</p>
<p>I have my Ph.D, and these are just some comments I have:
- Use your CPT for internships, you shouldn’t have to cut into OPT
- Start applying for jobs early, you can find yourself squeezed out of the H1-b cap. Of course I don’t know much about that because…
- I went straight to grad school from undergrad. I got into a Ph.D program, which is pretty much free (in STEM). Try drop out with a Masters if Ph.D is not your goal (Shhhhh!).</p>
<p>yesterday, Barack Obama talked about making it easier for international students in the U.S. to stay there efter they have graduated. Let us all hope this proposition comes through in time!</p>
<p>^we all hope that will happen, swedishChris!</p>
<p>I don’t know how common this is, but my college has a “Bachelor then Masters” program where you do 4 years of undergrad followed by 1 more year for your master’s in the same major. I am hoping that this will give us double the CPT and OPT time, since we will technically be completing two degrees (Bachelor and Master). Anyone has experience/ heard of such thing with their college?</p>
<p>^ I posed that very same question to an immigration lawyer a little while back and here’s the response I got. If the Bachelor and Master’s degrees are consecutive (i.e. you get the Bachelor’s degree after 4 years and are a graduate student in the 5th), you’ll get your OPT and CPT times for each degree separately. If you get the Master’s degree concurrently with the Bachelor’s degree (i.e. you get both degrees at the same time after 5 years), you’ll only get OPT for the Bachelor’s degree.</p>
<p>One more thing: you cannot use OPT for a degree until after you’ve completed your first year in that degree program. If the programs are consecutive, you will get another 12 months of OPT for the Master’s degree, but you cannot actually use it until after you have finished the degree (since it’s a one-year program). If you want to work in the summer between the Bachelor’s and the Master’s degree, you’d have to use post-completion OPT from the Bachelor’s degree.</p>