A tidbit on the US visa may be helpful to some. If you are interested in optics or biomedical conference or exchange visit, and are a national of certain countries (India in my case, China in my friends’ case), it is rather important to start the process early. Earlier than what the embassy website usually advises. These applications tend to enter what is called ’special administrative processing’ (I presume) due to the sensitive nature of the subject. I was to attend SPIE’s Photonics West in Jan 2009, but missed it due to this processing which took more than 3 months. The results of that processing allowed me to secure the visa for the Frontiers in Optics in two weeks. I was informed by the visa officer that, for first-time-applicants, the processing time has reduced from 100 days to around 6 weeks due to some recent reforms.
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August 19, 2009 at 12:36 am |
We had very good luck with visas this summer (2009) – only 2 rejections out of ~60 for Optics & Photonics. The US State Department has re-allocated staff to help the situation and we did not see any visas go into the black hole of “special processing.” This change was something that SPIE and other scientific societies really pushed on in the last year (letters, joint statements, etc.) and actually found success with the latest administration change. Glad your visa worked out!