Prior to applying for the Erasmus Mundus program, I actually had plenty of experience applying for visas. In fact, I left my country when I was 18; that means I was processing my first visa when I was 17. It is usually not a complicated process, but you do need to allow enough time to get everything done in time. As a general rule of thumb, it is important to start the visa process 6 months prior to your intended departure. This allows you enough time to collect all the documents needed for the application. Unfortunately, for this time, I only had about 3 months since the program notified me until the program started, so I had to get everything done in a rush.
The first thing to do upon applying for the visa in Erasmus Mundus is to make sure with the program coordinator what exact type of visa you are to obtain for your program. In the case of my program (ARCHMAT,) I will be studying for 2 years in Europe, so I was required to obtain a residency visa. This visa will be valid for 4 months and allows you to apply for a residency card in Portugal, with which essentially you can stay in Europe after the visa expires after 4 months. Those who did not make sure and got a temporary visa by mistake had to struggle a lot later in the program because when their visa expired, they were no longer legal to stay in Europe.
My passport is Japanese; I thought about returning to Japan temporarily to apply for a Portuguese visa, but I found out that permanent residents of the US can apply for visas in the United States. I ended up staying in California and applied through the consulate in San Francisco. The pandemic actually worked in my favor because I did not need to go to an in-person interview for the visa to San Francisco; instead, I was able to submit all the documents including my passport by mail. Once the visa was approved, the documents and the passport were simply returned to me, again by mail. I would have not minded the drive to San Francisco, but it did save me a massive amount of time.
I had to apply through a private visa application company called VFS, not directly with a consulate, because the consulate has outsourced the job to VFS. This VFS is quite unreliable, to say the least. In the first place, there is little information online about Portuguese student visas on their website. Then I called to ask questions, but VFS itself doesn’t have a lot of information, so I would get different answers every time I called depending on who would pick up the call.
I was a little iffy if this was going to be alright, but in the end, I was able to get a visa about three weeks after applying! Even so, the total of $360 is quite a lot for a typical student visa, compared to another country.
All applications are based on the US consulate, so if you are applying in another country, I think the procedures will be different but hope this information helps someone out there.
In the next post, I will be writing about the list of documents I sent as the visa application and how to obtain them along with the costs.
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