Hi colleagues,
This is Aliaksandr Nekrashevich from the Smith School of Business at Queens University. I am in my 5th year of pursuing a Ph.D. degree in management science. If that matters, the academic supervisors/colleagues are Mikhail Nediak, Yuri Levin, and Guang Li. Queens University is located in Kingston, Ontario (Canada), for those unfamiliar with the location.
What usually happens during our Ph.D. journey is that we should sometimes travel to conferences, and the INFORMS Annual Meeting is one of the most important among them. The major problem I have observed is getting a relevant USA visa, which has stopped me from visiting the INFORMS Annual Meeting twice already.
I arrived in Canada from the Republic Of Belarus (where I was born and have citizenship), and therefore have no permanent residence or citizenship in Canada. The relevant conference visa is B-1. Being a citizen of a country far away and reasonably unfriendly to the USA (due to the Russian-Ukrainian story), I would need an interview. The waiting times are huge in all Canadian centers: 860 days in Toronto, 850 days in Ottawa, 868 days in Vancouver, 710 days in Quebec, 840 days in Halifax, and 882 days in Calgary. Here is the reference: Visa Appointment Wait Times (state.gov). For those who have observed a similar situation, could you please share your experience and relevant workarounds?
Perhaps I should share my own (unsuccessful) experience. The first thing I tried to achieve was getting Canadian PR or citizenship. For those with Canadian passports, travel to the USA is visa-free. Subject to Canadian legislation, the chances of getting PR/citizenship while obtaining a Ph.D. degree tend to be zero. Yes, there is the Express Entry program that allows getting permanent residence and citizenship afterward (for those who are lucky). I applied there once. Still, we only get reasonably eligible when we have enough work experience, and even then, the rating in the application pool is far from the top. Moreover, one can rarely observe international students with more than two years of work experience (my case) before starting a Ph.D. degree.
In parallel, I have heard that getting a job visa to the USA is way easier. One of my former industrial colleagues in Belarus successfully got a US visa for a job internship but could not get a B1 visa for a conference of a similar scale in artificial intelligence afterward. Naturally, we usually expect academic advisors to be unhappy about such scenarios (since that results in a season with no research progress, and aligning dates with the conference is a challenge). I seriously considered this path but have not found a reasonable compromise (yet).
Thank you,
Alexander
P.S. My classmate and colleague recently joked that I should have applied for INFORMS Annual 2024 when I started studying (in Winter 2020).
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Aliaksandr Nekrashevich
Ph.D. Student
Smith School of Business
Kingston ON
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