F-1 STUDENT VISA AND OPT

Why It's So Important to Graduate in May

When you are in the US on an F visa studying a bachelor’s or master’s degree, the single most important thing to decide is when to graduate. Should you graduate with your friends in May? Or should you try to double up on the class load so that you can graduate in December? If you graduate in December you may save some money on tuition, but you are seriously limiting your immigration options.

Here is the best advice, and you probably will not hear this from your school: graduate in May or July.

Do not graduate in December. Here’s why…

If you are currently here on an F visa, you surely know that after you graduate you are entitled to obtain a work permit for 12 months that will allow you to work at any U.S. company as long as the position is related to what you studied. But if you are like most students, you want to stay in the U.S., so your primary option to stay will be the H-1B visa.

There are 85,000 H-1B visas allowed each year. They begin to count the number of H-1B visas on April 1st, and the past two years all 85,000 new H-1B’s were locked up within the first week after April 1.

This means that if you are going to rely on the H-1B visa to stay in the U.S. after graduation, you need to find an employer that will petition for your H-1B on April 1, which means you need to be working for that employer for months before. The reason is that most employers will not petition for your H-1B unless they like your work, so they typically want to employ you on OPT for a few months before committing to giving you the visa.

Keep in mind that although you have the bridge of OPT, the OPT rules are rigid. You get 12 months of work authorization, and then you have 60 days to leave the U.S. after completing the 12 months. But if you apply for an H-1B while you are on OPT your OPT extends until October 1st to bridge you from April 1st (H-1B petition opening day) to the first day that you can work on your H-1B, which is the new fiscal year of the U.S. government that starts on October 1st.

If you graduate in May this works out perfectly. You get OPT from May to May, so that in April of the next year your employer can apply for your H-1B on April 1st.

But if you graduate in December this works out horribly. You get OPT from January to January, then you have 60 days to leave, so the end of March. Now that you won’t have a valid status on April 1st you will not be able to apply for the H-1B by changing your status. And think about it, what employer is going to want to apply for your H-1B, and then have you leave the U.S. for 6 months while you wait for October 1st to come around? There are some employers who will do this, but not many.

So it is very important that you at all costs do not graduate in December unless you understand the consequences of this decision, which means you likely will need to rely on another visa category to be able to stay in the U.S., for example, an E-2 visa, O-1, or EB-5.