The officer is not inside your industry
One mistake I had to watch for in my EB-1A petition was writing like the reader already understood my world. They did not.
Topic
DIY
A collection of 12 issues
The recommendation letters that helped me were specific, not glowing
When I first thought about EB-1A recommendation letters, I assumed the goal was praise. Strong praise.
Do not make the officer guess where a document came from
One of the quietest ways to weaken evidence is to strip it of its source. A screenshot with no URL is harder to trust.
Your resume explains chronology. Your petition explains eligibility.
A resume asks: What did you do, and when?
My exhibit list got better when I stopped treating it like storage
My final EB-1A petition had 40 exhibits. That number only tells half the story.
Prestige is context. Responsibility is proof.
A famous venue is not proof. A famous company is not proof.
I had Forbes coverage from 12 years ago. Here's how I used it as EB-1A evidence.
In December 2011, Forbes ran an article called "Can't meet Eric Schmidt in Paris at LeWeb'11!? No Worries." It covered an event I had organized called the LeWeb Student Warm-up, held just before the main LeWeb conference in Paris. I was 22.
Seven months
7 things I did before writing a single paragraph of my petition
7 things I did before writing a single paragraph of my petition
Most people think petition writing starts with writing.
It does not.
The writing was the easy part. Everything that made the writing easy happened before I typed a single paragraph of my cover letter.
Here are the seven
6 months from now, will you still be "researching"?
Let me ask you something uncomfortable. Six months from now, where will you be in this visa journey?
You can't edit a blank page
The biggest thing holding most EB-1A candidates back isn't a lack of qualifications. It's the absence of a draft.
There's research. There's notes. There are bookmarked success stories and saved Reddit threads and half-finished Notion pages. But there's no draft.