COVID-19 impact | Rush to get US visa appointments is testing Indian students' patience

Mayank Lohokare is running out of patience. The 22-year-old from Indore says if he can’t make it to the US this August, he will drop his plan to do higher studies until COVID-19 is officially over. Four universities in America had accepted his application for a master’s programme in industrial engineering last February. But the pandemic, and later its resurgence, in the US and India grounded that plan.

“I have finally got appointments for my biometric and visa interviews in Kolkata on July 20 and 29. But what if Kolkata goes into a lockdown and the interviews are cancelled? I don’t have a buffer time as my college starts on August 19. So I am trying to rescheduled and prepone my dates,” Lohokare says.

As colleges start or resume in the US in August and September, Indian students with admission letters to American universities are pressed for time. They have to get their F1 visas – a process that was interrupted in April and May because of the second wave of COVID-19.

These students are a visa away from starting their master's programmes in the US.

The uncertainty isnerve-racking. And there is so many decisions to be made, and so little to go on: booking the flights would be cheaper now but what if they don’t clear the interviews? College students need to still write final exams. They say they need to fly out of the country before a third wave kicks in and puts the brakes on their American dream.

Then there are those who haven’t gotten a visa appointment yet. At any given point in the day, at least 2,000 students can be seen online on a Telegram group that posts updates on the availability of visa slots, Lohokare says.

When the US Embassy in India resumed processing student visas on June 14, its website crashed. This despite the fact that it had opened tens of thousands of visa slots for students joining colleges in the fall (autumn). An applicant compared the rush to “a war” while a visa booking agent was reminded of “the CoWin app crash”.

Behind this barrage of logins were students who had deferred their higher studies by a year, those who had freshly applied for undergrad courses and those who’ve been attending college online. There were also students who had their visa appointments for April and May cancelled, and those who got slots as late as November and January next year!

Also read: Covid impact | Why the extra Rs1.2 lakh for 10 days of quarantine is tripping up Indian students headed to the UK for higher studies

The lucky escape

Sahib Arora “just managed to pull it off that day” and find slots on July 8 and 9. With this, the 21-year-old is a step closer to pursuing a master’s degree in computer science from the Rutgers University in New Jersey.

“The embassy hadn’t specified the time it would open slots but I think everybody assumed it to be 9am as that’s the usual business hour. That happened and the webpage could not process requests because of too much traffic. We can’t log in many times or we get blocked for 72 hours, so I started refreshing the page instead. After 45 minutes, I found slots in New Delhi and guess what? Ten minutes later, the site went down for maintenance,” Arora recalls.

Since Arora lives in Bengaluru, he would have liked to book Chennai as the visa processing centre, as the other US consulates are further away in Hyderabad, Mumbai, Kolkata and New Delhi. “But at this moment, anything will do,” says Arora.

Vandita Manohar, 22, who’s been accepted for a master’s course in business intelligence and analytics at Steven Institute of Technology in New Jersey, had an even more gruelling time. “I didn’t find slots for 1.5 hours. Out of panic, I called up the US consulate at New Delhi to seek help. I am not kidding, but I called them 230 times. When we finally connected, it took them at four hours to get me a slot in July,” Manohar says.

However, getting the F1 visa is not the end of this bumpy road for students like Manohar and Arora. “I am yet to write my final year exams. In normal times, the exams wrap up by July, but this year, the college hasn’t even announced the dates. What if it’s postponed to August? I need to be in the US in August,” says Manohar, a Bengaluru resident.

The cost of dreams

Last we checked, tickets for flights from India to America scheduled for July and August were Rs45,000-75,000. But some students have gone on a limb and bought a ticket even before taking the visa interview. It helps that they got a discounted ticket that’s also partially refundable but it’s an indirect flight, so the risk of getting stuck in transit countries remains.

There is also the cost of quarantine. “Some colleges have asked international students to quarantine outside (in a hotel or hostel) on arrival. That’s expensive. Thankfully, my college is not among those,” says a girl from Hyderabad on condition of anonymity.

Add to this, the spiralling rental. “The cost of renting an apartment has gone up since the pandemic. It’s $800 in New Jersey. That’s Rs60,000 per month,” says Manohar.

Lohokare says: “From coaching for GRE and IELTS and taking the test to applying to colleges in 2020 and reapplying this year and booking the visa interviews, I’ve spent Rs2.5 lakhs. And this doesn’t even include the cost of the flight I would take to Kolkata for my visa round and to the US.”

Like Lohokare, the girl who asked not to be named says she had deferred her master’s plan and spent lakhs towards it. Now she just wants her efforts to pay off. “But I am going to study aeronautics and it falls under the Technological Alert List (which includes nuclear science, robotics, biotechnology and other fields). Students coming under this list are scrutinised more than the others, so their visa processing usually takes longer. In my case, my visa appointment and programme start date are only two weeks apart,” she says.

If her visa doesn’t work out in time, she has requested the data analytics company she works in to let her continue her job. “Looking for a new job in the pandemic is difficult,” she says and talks of her college batchmates who chose overseas education over placements and now are sitting idle, with a gap on their resume.

Also read: COVID-19 impact | 1.5 years on, students enrolled in Chinese universities are stuck in India due to travel restrictions

‘Do not defer’

Experts agree that the second wave has been a bigger blow to these American dreams than the first outbreak. All borders were closed last year, so there was no scope of overseas education. But this year, the US opened while India locked down and that impeded the visa processing as also clearing of bank loans.

Take the case of GoUSA education consultancy. It needs to find visa interview slots for 500 students going this fall. A majority are carry-forwards from last year; the clients who could not find slots for the spring semester (January onwards). “It’s been a challenging time for us too. So we have asked our student clients to keep looking for visa slots. If they get lucky before we do, good for them,” top boss Ilaya Bharathi says.