F1 visa interview experiences analysis
Ever wondered what questions are asked in an F1 visa interview? You can go by your gut that this question might be asked or even brainstorm with your friends and come up with some questions that might not be asked in the student visa interviews. If you are in student groups, then students/seniors will be sharing their visa interview experiences.
Fortunately, I found a telegram channel with more than 2000+ student interview experiences from Dec 2020. But the issue was as there were many student interview experiences to go through one by one manually.
So, I used python to extract messages from the telegram group. In addition, heuristics, and NER were used to extract important data from the interview experiences. As the student experiences were from Indian students, the consulate locations are located in India. Enough talk. Let’s jump to the results.
A word cloud is a visual representation (image) of word data. In other words, it is a collection, or cluster, of words depicted in different sizes. The bigger and bolder the word appears, the more often it’s mentioned within a given text and the more important it is. — https://help.vevox.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009930318-Word-cloud-explained-
As expected, the questions like When did you graduate, What does your father do, etc are in larger font meaning these are important. But if you observe in the bottom left corner of the image, an interesting question What are your quarantine plans has been asked. Prepare yourself for this question too 😀. Now jumping on to word clouds for individual consulates.
Questions asked across consulates
- Why study in the USA?
- What does your father(parents/mother) do?
- What is your father’s(Parents/Mother’s) annual income?
- What is your father’s profession?
- Why this university?
- How many universities did you get admitted into?
- How are you funding your education?
- Do you have any loans? Collateral or Non-Collateral?
- Who is sponsoring you?
- What are your quarantine plans?
- What course are you admitted into?
- Why this course?
- Do you have any siblings?
- What about your savings?
- Any work experience?
- Why are pursuing the masters now?
- What are your future plans?
- What is your major in undergrad?
- If you are pursuing electronics or electric-related master’s, “What is VLSI” was also asked 😅.
- When did you complete your bachelor's?
- What are you doing after you completed your bachelor’s or undergrad?
- Tell me about your studies and what was your undergrad score?
- For those who are pursuing a master’s in AI/ML, “What is NLP” was also asked.
So, I would suggest knowing the jargon terms in your master’s pursuing field and try to explain them clearly and concisely.
Observations
- Do you have any siblings? was asked more times at Chennai Consulate when compared with other locations.
- In the Mumbai consulate, How many admits? was asked more times when compared with other locations.
- From the Kolkata consulate: Are you married? — Maybe people with a good amount of industry experience are pursuing masters from Kolkata I guess.
- What is your quarantine plan — This question was asked too. So prepare yourself especially during these corona times!!!
Finally, below are the word clouds for accepted and rejected interview experiences.
Other than asking specifically for GRE score, all the questions were matching for rejected and Accepted candidates. Note that, the count of visa interview experiences for rejected is 10x less than of Accepted VI experiences. Even if any pattern was observed, the observation would be skewed as we have fewer data.
Those who are interested in the code, please refer to the below repo.
For those who want to understand how to get the code from the telegram channel, please read my tutorial - https://medium.com/@nithinbharadwajd/how-to-get-data-from-telegram-using-python-1e0d5e98067f
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