The first steps are—of course—getting into and committing to your college.

If you’ve done those

already, congratulations!

After you’ve committed, colleges will send out a form called the Certification of Finances for
international students to fill out. This is to verify that you have the funds necessary to pay for
your first year of college. It probably depends on the college, but some might also ask you to
submit bank statements (or statements of other types of savings such as insurance, retirement
funds, et cetera). If you are on financial aid (or merit and external scholarships), you only need to
show proof of funds for the amount listed as parent/student contribution for 2023-24 on your
financial aid award. Tax forms and wage statements do not qualify as proof, and this has nothing
to do with your CSS profile and whatever documents you submitted to the financial aid office
before admissions. You do not have to provide statements for all of your bank accounts if you
have several (unless you want to). This step might be slightly different for people going to public
or mid-tier private colleges, as I have heard of colleges issuing I-20s without additional
verification. You should email your college’s international office if you’re unsure.

Some colleges might not ask for statements or anything other than the COF form at all. And
some colleges, like Yale for example, won’t even ask for the COF and might have their own
survey that you can access with your @college.edu email address. I did not have to fill out the
COF myself, so I cannot offer guidance about that. If you have done it and would like to
volunteer to help, let me know and I’ll include your input for others to see. Rest assured that this
does not affect anything and is only to help your college fill out your SEVIS information and
issue you a Form I-20.

Any time between when your I-20 is ready and up to three days before your visa appointment, a
$350 SEVIS I-901 fee must be paid to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Yale paid my
SEVIS fee before even issuing my I-20, and depending on their policy for international students
on full-ride scholarships, your college might do it too. Some will ask you to pay it first and then
reimburse you once you're on campus. But the vast majority of colleges will not, even if you are
on full financial aid. You can pay with any dual currency credit/debit/prepaid card, but you must
call your bank to raise the limit above $300 first (because foreign transactions over $300 are not
allowed by default in Bangladesh). It’s best to pay it as soon as possible, so you can grab a
super-early surprise slot that opens up randomly or if you would like to apply for an expedited
appointment, in which case the I-901 payment confirmation will help.

After your college has taken a few days to verify your financial documentation, you will receive
your I-20 that will include your SEVIS ID and other information necessary to fill out the Online
Nonimmigrant Visa Application (DS-160). It asks for a lot of information and can take up to an
hour to complete. I skimmed Samin Rahman’s “How to Fillup the DS 160” as a guide before
filling out mine, and it definitely helped. Here are some tips that might be useful:
1. To speed up the process, you can actually start filling out the DS-160 before you even
receive your I-20. When you do receive the I-20, you just have to fill out the SEVIS
information section before submitting your application. But do not start too early,
because you need to complete your application within 30 days of starting it, or you’ll
have to go through a weird process to retrieve it or just restart your application.

2. You will need a 2in*2in photo taken in the last six months before you can submit your
application. Make sure you get a 600px*600px soft copy of the same photo from your
studio to go with your online submission.

3. Make sure all your information matches your passport.

4. List all your social media for the sake of transparency. I listed my Facebook, Instagram,
LinkedIn, Twitter, Letterboxd, and TikTok.

5. Your “Intended Date of Arrival” does not have to be exact. I just picked the day before
my program’s starting date. It doesn’t matter if you pick a date a week or two earlier.

6. Enter your college’s address for “Address where you will stay in the U.S.”. Your college
might have a DS-160 FAQ where they list their address, or you can just look it up.

7. “Person paying for your trip” will either be your college or your parents/sponsor.

8. If you have a pending F4 application, be sure to say yes and explain accordingly.

9. Your college will give you instructions about who to list as “U.S. Point of Contact”.

10. If you are on a gap year, your “Primary Occupation” should say “other” or
“unemployed”, and you have to list your high school information on the next page. For
people like myself who are still in high school, just pick “student” and fill out the rest.
Dates of attendance can be rough estimates.

11. Everything on the “Security Information” pages should say “no”, unless your answer for
something actually is “yes”, in which case, you might be in trouble.

12. “Additional Point of Contact” can be any adult in Bangladesh you know apart from your
relatives, such as your teachers and mentors. I listed my friends’ parents.

13. For the SEVIS information page, refer to your I-20. Listing the CIP code along with your
major is up to you. Street Address does not have to match your I-20 exactly, and you can
just use your college’s address instead. In any case, it’s not a big deal because your
university will have a lot of different offices and addresses.

14. It is crucial that you submit your DS-160 at least 7 days before your appointment, so do
not rush to grab a slot before your application is complete.
After you have your DS-160 confirmation number, you can open a CGI Federal account and start
scheduling an appointment. All the information in your CGI Profile must match your DS-160
and passport, and in the last page, you will be given a deposit slip for a $160 MRV fee that you
can print and fill out before taking to any EBL Branch. I live right next to an EBL, so the whole
thing took me about 10 minutes. One business day after your payment, navigate to the same page
on CGI where the deposit slip showed up, and you will see a prompt saying you have a receipt
number ready to use, and it will be updated automatically. You can then move forward and
schedule your appointment at your convenience. If your receipt number did not update by itself, I
recently found out that your receipt number is the same as your “CGI Reference Number” which
you can update manually using the deposit slip that was generated by CGI.

Then comes the (second) worst part of the visa application process as a Bangladeshi national.
Keep in mind that you will have two chances to reschedule your first appointment should a more
convenient slot be available at a later time. If you need to reschedule a third time, you will have
to pay the $160 MRV fee again. Depending on how things are when you’re about to schedule
your initial appointment, there might be no unbooked appointments before your starting date at
all. Luckily for you, there are two options:

1. The U.S. Embassy knows what’s up and they release spare slots at random times
throughout the week, often quite late into the night and sometimes even on the weekends.
You have no way of knowing when and in what quantity the slots will be available, and
they are often booked within seconds of being released, so you need to be quick with
your hands. To make matters worse, you can only log into your CGI account up to 12
times each day, and your account will be frozen for 72 hours if you cross the limit.
Logging into the portal concurrently with different browsers or devices might also result
in a ban. The solution is to join the Telegram channels US-F1 SLOT UPDATE and HSD
for USA. In the first channel, people like you and me check the appointment calendar at
certain intervals and send updates about the earliest available slot. Every 2-4 days, a bulk
of convenient new slots are released and almost every day there are updates about
standalone early slots that have been canceled by someone else. You should do your part
to update the channel as well. However, keep in mind that any discussion is not allowed
in the updates channel, and you need to use the discussion channel if you have any
questions. You should make it a priority to check the channels at all times, because
lucrative slots are booked just as soon as they’re released. There are also other social
media groups, but I personally haven’t used them.

2. The second option is both easier and riskier, because your emergency request is not
guaranteed to be approved (and you can only request it once). If the request fails, you
have to retreat to option #1. But here it goes anyway: if you see that the earliest available
appointment is after your program’s starting date—or under a week earlier—you can
book it initially and request an emergency appointment. In some countries, emergency
requests are only allowed if your starting date is in 60 days, and in some, 14 days.
 However, emergency requests for F-1 students are not officially an option at all in
Bangladesh, but the U.S. Embassy in recent years has started to approve such requests
when they’re appropriate. An acquaintance called the embassy and they confirmed that
the 60-day window does not apply to Bangladeshis (although you might have higher
chances of success if you apply within or close to the window). When requesting an
emergency appointment, most people used to select “business” as there wasn’t a proper
category for Bangladeshi F-1 applicants before. That seems to have changed, and there is
now a fifth category that I have heard people are using instead. You then have to use the
brief explanation box to explain your need for an expedited appointment as a student. The
“tentative travel date” must match your DS-160. You will also be allowed to attach up to
five documents (in PDF format) to support your case. You must attach the following:
Form I-20, DS-160 confirmation page, and SEVIS I-901 payment confirmation page.
You can submit your request with just these, but correspondence from your college
officials stating that your presence on move-in day is mandatory will make your case
stronger. When I was planning to request an expedited appointment, I wrote a 200-word
explanation and attached—apart from the three basic documents—a scanned PDF
compilation of all the letters I received in my acceptance package. However, I was able to
schedule a suitable regular appointment, so there was no need for an emergency request
at that point. Some colleges might not issue I-20s till late April or early May, so this
might be the wiser option for a lot of you. In any case, don’t worry about interview
availability—more slots will start to open up closer to fall, and people like Iffat Zarif
(Yale ‘26) and Shabab Tashrif Zaman (Princeton ‘26) had interviewed as late as August 1
and August 10 and were still able to move in on time.

However, here are some important things to note about requesting an emergency appointment:

1. The total size of your attachments (supporting documents) must be under 10 megabytes;
otherwise your request will be submitted without the attachments that exceed the limit
(and you cannot fix the mistake in any way).

2. Even if your emergency request has been approved, the earliest available emergency
appointment might currently be in July or August because of the increased demand.
Someone informed me that you must select an emergency interview date within seven
days (sometimes fewer, as will be indicated in your approval email) of your request being
approved, or you will have to go back to scheduling a regular appointment. Emergency
slots will also be updated like regular slots, though.

3. I also heard that you can apply for an emergency appointment twice in Bangladesh, but I
can’t verify if that’s true. You should try and find out at your own discretion. [Update:
Apparently, it is true.]
The last step is, of course, preparing for your interview. Most people are scared of the interview,
but if you know basic English and are going to a prestigious college with a lot of scholarship and
financial aid money, you have nothing to worry about. Even if you have a high deficit or a
pending F4 application/immediate relatives (parents/siblings) with a green card, you will
definitely be fine if you answer the questions with confidence. If you would still like some
reassurance, read some of these transcripts of interviews from F-1 applicants. It’s too early to be
thinking about the interview, but here are still some things you should know:

1. F-1 applicants do not need medical examinations, immunization records, and police
verification.

2. You need to bring your passport, I-20, appointment confirmation page, DS-160
confirmation page, SEVIS I-901 payment confirmation, EBL MRV payment receipt,
2in*2in photo, acceptance and scholarship letters, school and board transcripts and
standardized test score reports. You should also bring bank statements and wage
statements just to be safe, but they will almost never want to see them. Your answers are
what matter.

3. If you want to practice for your upcoming interview, here’s an F-1 Interview Simulator I
found (but it’s not that good, to be honest). Also, if you want to know more about how
the interview works, I found this channel called Argo Visa quite helpful.

In case you’re worried that the whole thing is too tedious and stressful—I won’t disagree, but
here’s a timeline of how things went down for me:

Fri, Dec 16 at 04:00 – Got into Yale

Wed, Mar 15 at 00:42 – Received Yale I-20 survey (COF-alternative); submitted it in 10 mins
Thu, Mar 16 at 21:49 – Collected my 600x600 photo from the local studio
Fri, Mar 17 at 16:34 – Started filling out the DS-160 in advance
Sat, Mar 18 at 00:35 – Yale paid my SEVIS I-901 fee and sent me the receipt
Sat, Mar 18 at 00:55 – Received my Form I-20
Sat, Mar 18 at 06:35 – Submitted my DS-160 and generated MRV deposit slip on CGI Federal
Sun, Mar 19 at 10:40 – Paid the MRV fee at EBL (because they’re closed on Saturdays)
Mon, Mar 20 at 15:28 – Scheduled a regular appointment on Jun 18
Tue, Mar 21 at 23:48 – Rescheduled my (regular) appointment to Mar 28
Tue, Mar 28 at 07:45 – Nailed the interview and got my visa approved
Tue, Mar 28 at 20:09 – Booked an Aug 4 Emirates flight to New York
Wed, Mar 29 at 15:10 – Paid my plane fare at the Emirates Office in Gulshan
Thu, Mar 30 at 13:42 – Picked up my visa-stamped passport from VFS Global

Some might say I was too lucky (which, again, I won’t disagree with), but it’s more about
checking your phone 24/7 (finally some use of my #1 personality trait) and being familiar with
the CGI portal and being quick with your hands (because standalone slots are gone within
seconds of being released). It’s stressful in the sense that you basically have to beat the entire F-1
applicant pool of Bangladesh in a race to grab the earliest slot, but you’ve got this!

For a while since getting accepted in December, I was also worried about the availability of
appointments and the frequency at which slots are released. However, I tracked slots regularly in
the second and third weeks of March and realized the situation isn’t actually terrible. It should
help you relax as well, so here’s the data I compiled about when and how many slots were
released in those two weeks:

Tue 07/03 11:47 – Mar 9 Bulk

Wed 08/03 19:26 – Jun 20 Bulk
Wed 08/03 19:19 – Apr 16 Few
Thu 09/03 11:37 – Mar 13 Bulk
Sun 12/03 18:08 – Jun 18 Bulk
Mon 13/03 21:30 – May, Jun, Jul Few
Mon 13/03 17:39 – Mar 28 Bulk
Thu 16/03 18:00 – Apr 26, 28 “Super Friday” (?)
Fri 17/03 15:26 – Jul 30 Bulk

This should be enough reassurance that if things continue the way they are, you will be able to
book a convenient appointment several weeks (or months) in advance of your program’s starting
date even if your college is delaying your I-20. If this guide reaches people I’m not connected
with already, you can email [email protected] if you have any questions. Good luck!