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personal history on IMM-0008

pdo

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Feb 14, 2010
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hi,

I have a some questions regarding the details on the form IMM-0008, specifically the "personal history" section of the application. I understand that there are not to be any gaps in the history, so those need to be accounted for with "unemployed" or what have you, but it's unclear to me how to account for periods of overlapping activity. Meaning, if I have many areas of my life in this history where i am working two or three different jobs, is there an expected way to deal with that? I have been entering in each part of my history in chronological order of start date, but with overlapping jobs, that sometimes mean that the end dates of each period of my life don't coincide perfectly with the next start date. Like say, I'm in school, but start a job while I was in school, and that job carries over past my graduation date and for a period is the only thing i am doing. Or, for my partner, who works as a freelance designer, she's been doing that for several years, but often times has specific jobs with an employer that overlap with her freelance activities. In a way, the freelance activities are largely happening in between specific periods of work with an employer (say, Summer months in between teaching jobs), but it's not like she ever stopped doing the freelance work, it just happens less sometimes.

Any advice or previous experience of how best to handle this? I considered fudging the numbers on some things to make it appear as though i only had one thing going on in my life at once, but that seemed to make more of a mess, and of course was not entirely accurate.

thanks
 

flex007z

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Mar 16, 2010
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Toronto, ON
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More Questions:

Out of my 3 years of education I had 1 Summer off as no courses were offered in my college. So do I specify that in my Personal History Part?

I also had 2 Coop work-terms in between my education (But in addition to my 6 full-time study semesters), Do i specify that? I am confused as its said that coop is considered as a part of our studies and it does shows up in my Transcript.

As of now I have included my Summer and Coop both in to College Education Years.

A prompt reply will be highly appreciated.

Thanks
 

jes_ON

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Jun 22, 2009
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06-May-2010
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13-Aug-2010
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01-Mar-2011
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30-Jun-2011
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12-Jul-2011 (received 25-Jul-2011)
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pdo said:
hi,

I have a some questions regarding the details on the form IMM-0008, specifically the "personal history" section of the application. I understand that there are not to be any gaps in the history, so those need to be accounted for with "unemployed" or what have you, but it's unclear to me how to account for periods of overlapping activity. Meaning, if I have many areas of my life in this history where i am working two or three different jobs, is there an expected way to deal with that? I have been entering in each part of my history in chronological order of start date, but with overlapping jobs, that sometimes mean that the end dates of each period of my life don't coincide perfectly with the next start date. Like say, I'm in school, but start a job while I was in school, and that job carries over past my graduation date and for a period is the only thing i am doing. Or, for my partner, who works as a freelance designer, she's been doing that for several years, but often times has specific jobs with an employer that overlap with her freelance activities. In a way, the freelance activities are largely happening in between specific periods of work with an employer (say, Summer months in between teaching jobs), but it's not like she ever stopped doing the freelance work, it just happens less sometimes.

Any advice or previous experience of how best to handle this? I considered fudging the numbers on some things to make it appear as though i only had one thing going on in my life at once, but that seemed to make more of a mess, and of course was not entirely accurate.

thanks
Overlapping activity is true for most people. CIC told me it is no problem to have overlapping periods of activity, as long as it is clear why (or how it is possible). I found this difficult to manage in the tiny boxes on the form, and since I had to attach extra pages anyway, I duplicated the format in Word, except that the boxes were expandable.

So for my self-employed experience which was also intermittent and part time, I wrote that as part of the description....

And you are right, "fudging" the dates would create big problems . They do not have to be nice and neat - I think that would be a red flag, if they were...