To live in another country, it helps to get that country's permission first, if you can. When I was provisionally accepted into the University back in March, I was warned that the student visa application process for New Zealand can be involved. As it turned out, the visa application process was not the worst part about my preparations for the international move. But it certainly was involved. And expensive.
When I first looked up the requirements, it seemed to me that the application process breaks down into a few different categories: Academic Check, Police Check, Medical Check, and Financial Check.
First, Immigration wanted to make sure that I was going to be actually registered with a school before they were going to give me a student visa. This was the hardest part of my application to complete, because it required getting an 'offer of place,' which ended up taking forever to get. But eventually I got it at the beginning of August.
I wasn't just gonna wait around for the offer of place to come through, though, so at the beginning of June I started work on satisfying the Police and Medical Checks. The Police Check, which is actually called a Police Certificate, was the first part that I finished. Basically, New Zealand wants to know if you have a criminal record. To get a police certificate as a US citizen, I needed to order an Identity History Summary Check from the FBI. Going by mail takes 12-14 weeks, and you can only apply electronically through an FBI approved 'channeler.' So I went down to my local FBI channeler, where they took my fingerprints for $50, and within seconds I was emailed the results in a pdf form letter. Since they also did passport photos ($20), I ordered a couple sets, which were necessary for the medical check and for my visa application.
The Medical Check, or Medical Certificate, was by far the worst part of the application experience. Basically, the longer you stay in New Zealand, the greater the lengths you have to go through to prove that you have an 'acceptable standard of health.' Because I'm staying for more than 6 months, I needed to prove I don't have tuberculosis with a chest x-ray. Because I'm staying for more than 12 months I needed to get a full physical and blood work done.
(Side
Note: I hear there's a simple skin test for tuberculosis. I asked the
doctor about it and he said that New Zealand Immigration requires photo evidence because in some other countries people can bribe their doctor in exchange for good lab test results. However, I'm pretty sure it'd be just as easy to
bribe an x-ray technician to submit a picture of someone else's lungs. It's also silly because I'm pretty sure if you have tuberculosis, you could transmit
the disease within 6 months, long before you're supposed to prove you don't have it. So basically, this medical certificate biz is a racket.)
So the first hurdle is to find a doctor. New Zealand Immigration will only accept medical certificates filled out by a doctor who is on their 'panel of physicians.' There are 36 of them in the United States. The closest of the panel doctors to Portland, OR are in Seattle, WA; Oakland, CA; and Los Angeles, CA. I called in mid June, and the Seattle office was booking appointments a month and a half out at $480 a pop. The Oakland office was booking a week or two out at $780. I figured time was of the essence, so I went with the Oakland doctor.
($780
is the actual cost to the patient. I was asked to sign a form waiving
my rights to have any of the cost covered by insurance when I showed up.)
I took the 10-hour trip down to my parent's house in the Bay Area (~$112 in gas, round trip), and then drove out another 45 minutes to get my chest x-ray'd and my blood drawn. Once I got to the clinic, I realized I'd left my passport and passport photos back in my parent's house! So I got a new passport photo taken across the street at a drug store ($10), ran back in, paid them their blood money, and then had the physical and blood tests done. I was missing a lot of blood after that part. I got a little woozy, but I had a bunch of energy bars stashed in my car so I just ate those, sipped water, and listened to the radio for a while until I got my bearings. Then I came all the way back to Oakland the next morning with my passport in hand to get the x-ray at a partner clinic, and then I had to take the x-ray results back to the first doctor.
A week later I got the results back. Unfortunately, I had abnormally high levels of white blood cells! That could indicate that I had a parasite, or, much more likely, that I had allergies (I was sneezing all month; thanks hay fever!). My doctor told me I had to go to a medical lab franchise and get my blood work done over again to meet New Zealand Immigration's 'acceptable standard of health' ("You mean I don't have to go through an over-priced panel physician?!"). I was leaving for a roadtrip to the southwest, so it wasn't until a couple days later that I got to a lab in Albuquerque, NM, where a very kind nurse drew a (much smaller) blood sample and that was it. Thankfully, insurance covered the bill. Within a few weeks I got my final test results and a clean bill of health. Either the parasites kindly left my body once they realized they were an inconvenience, or I'm not as allergic to New Mexico as I am to Oregon and California.
Finally, I needed to prove that I could support myself financially while I was living in New Zealand, and afford a plane ticket out of the country when my studies were done. New Zealand Immigration gave no guidelines about what 'proof of funds' looks like for either of these requirements. Fortunately, my living costs were covered by my scholarship, which I proved with a formal scholarship offer, which also proved that my tuition was paid for.
For the outward travel, I went off the requirements that the University of Auckland uses in their immigration guidelines: Proof of Funds for outward travel can be established with bank statements showing 3-months transaction history and an available balance of NZ$1,500. Those statements could be mine, or for any rich person who would be willing to co-sign and sponsor my visa. Turns out, I am incredibly lucky. I didn't have all that much cash in the bank until Alaska Airlines paid me $800 after they bumped me off an oversold flight to Reno, NV for a family trip and refunded me the cost of my ticket at 400% the original price. With that kind of cash on hand, my balance was just over NZ$1,500 with early September exchange rates. So, all I had to do was go down to my local bank office, ask for 3 months transaction history, convert my available balance into NZ$, scan the 30-odd pages, and attach them to my online application.
Which was its own pain. No individual file that I uploaded for the application was allowed to be larger than 10 mb, and my bank statement scans kept coming in at 15 mb. I creatively cut out some of the blank pages and advertisements, hoping that Immigration officials wouldn't try to catch me up on the missing page numbers. The online application portal was filled with similar ambiguities and difficulties. I found out that I had to write in a comprehensive employment history, answer a number of arcane questions about the details of my academic program, and, with lots of uncertainty, finally hit submit.
Four weeks later, I received my student visa (total cost: $972)!
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