congrats to everyone who got ITA... good luck for the rest of the journey. and remember - the actual journey starts now
some pointers for everyone (I got my ITA end of December last year)
- If you are creating a whatsapp group, please PM your phone number to the group admin, do not post numbers for everyone to see... you never know who is watching and you dont want your number to fall in the hands of the wrong people (best case is marketing
)
- Get PCC done ASAP, takes a while to get that... and also start with the bank letters thing soon... remember - this is BANK LETTER, not bank statement alone... you ideally need 2 types of letters
1. Liability letter - Which shows what loans/credit cards you have with the bank... dont worry - they wont reject you if you have a loan or a big CC debt, they just want to see if you borrowed the PoF or not... trust me there is like >10% applicants who dont have outstanding CC or student loan or mortgage.. they cant reject everyone on this
2. Balance letter - This shows how much balance you have maintained over 6 months... I havent recd this letter yet (my bank said 10-15 for both letters, idiots..) but if bank doesnt want to show average balance, letter can say you have XYZ dollars(or whatever currency) in your account as of today and you can always add bank statement of last 6 months to back it up.
Just remember - one of the letters HAS to show when the account was opened, that is crucial.
- Travel history - Unfortunately you need to show travel history for all last 10 years, or since you turned 18... it was as painful as jumping on a bicycle without a seat for me as i have 3 full passports... but luckily you dont need to show travel between home country and country of residence (if applicable)
- pointer while entering travel history - There is some bug in the system becoz of which it shows that travel history is being entered, but when you log off, its completely erased when you log back in... so be careful - keep logging out and loggin in 2-3 times when you are entering this information (just to be sure)... dont want to be me - i entered 70 lines, but when i logged back in - nothing was there !!!!
- photo : amazingly this is causing some confusion so let me be clear. You just need a digital photo, not less than 60k, ideally around 240k, 35mm x 45mm frame. get this done with a professional photographer please.
- medicals : book a date ASAP, coz in some places and countries (particularly india) its not easy to get a date soon. After you are done with medicals, you just need to upload the paper they give online,... you WONT get result of medicals directly.
- all files are in pdf format only, except for the photo which needs to be jpeg. File limitation is 4MB for pdfs. if pdf is too big, you can use smallpdf.com to compress pdf files.
i think thats about it - good luck everyone