A Survival Guide to UK Visa Disasters

Ghost Month is here, and so, quietly, is peak visa season for students heading abroad.

In this post I've rounded up the small details you can't skip when you check your application.

For: 🙋‍♀️ humans prone to little disasters 🙋 people who don't live in northern Taiwan and can't easily keep going back to the office

🌟 Before you go:

➡️Travel history for the past ten years

Among the ridiculous number of questions you have to fill in, it asks for your entry and exit records for the past ten years.

Take it from me, after queuing two hours at the immigration office in New Taipei:

you really can just fill in the trips stamped in your passport and that's enough.

If you've done an exchange before and, like me, wandered around Europe without ever getting stamped,

you don't have to dutifully count every trip.

🌟 Uploads

➡️Consent Letter and Proof of relationship:

If you list your parents as your source of funds, you need to upload a document proving your relationship 📄

Usually that's the English version of your household registration. Some people got approved without uploading it, so decide for yourself whether to include it,

but if you do decide to prepare it, start early!

The English household registration takes six days to come through, and you'll need the English spellings from your family members' passports.

I'd suggest going to an out-of-the-way household registration office. I found one with hardly anyone there and got it in two days.

If the household registration office is too far, you can shift the money around a month in advance

and just put yourself down as the payer.

➡️Check list

You don't need to sign it before uploading. Just download the new version and upload it.

🌟On the day:

➡️Bring cash (at least 2,000):

That way, if you suddenly find you're missing something, at least the office staff can scan it for you.

Or if you decide on the spot to add a delivery service or something like that.

➡️Bus: get off at Xinyi-Songren Intersection. MRT: take the Red Line to Xiangshan and use Exit 1

➡️Charge your phone fully; you'll need to scan a QR code

➡️To get a "visitor pass" for the 7th floor you must bring your driver's license or NHI card. You'll be taking your national ID card upstairs that day, so don't hand over your ID card as the deposit ➡️Hand in the "latest" version of your Appointment Confirmation.

Whenever your information is updated, they send you an email like this.

Under the attachments it lists every file you've uploaded. Remember to check them one by one;

on the day I went back with missing documents, I saw the student ahead of me had forgotten theirs.

➡️Hand in the Check list:

The office keeps the first page. Where the later pages ask for your signature, you don't need to sign.

➡️A black-and-white copy of your passport is enough; no need to print in color.

➡️When your CAS goes wrong

That would be me 🙋

My school typed my passport number wrong on my CAS. It's such important information, and somehow I completely missed it.

I wasn't the only unlucky one, either. While I was handing in my documents again, I overheard a girl at the next counter whose details the school had also gotten wrong.

Still, even though the school made the mistake, we slipped up too.

I got my CAS on 8/4 and was rushing to submit my visa application on 8/11, so I didn't double-check what the school sent me.

When you get yours, remember to check it first 🥲

Hopefully you won't be as clueless as me and only discover the error at the visa center.

The lady at the office was complaining that schools made a lot of administrative errors this year, too.

Whatever you do, don't trust your school so much that you skip checking QAQ

Now for the main point of this post:

What do you do if it happens to you?

Ans: write an email ✉️ + throw money at the problem

"Step1": write an email ✉️

Contact your school right away 🏫 ‼️ Ask them to add the correction to your CAS as a "note"

and update it in the UKVI system. The bad news is that VFS can't see it,

so if the school doesn't send you a new CAS, all they can do is delete your old details

and let the visa officer pull up your record from UKVI. That way you won't be refused.

"Step2": throw money at the problem

Submitting the missing documents, which is really your second visa submission, requires the walk-in service.

Taken literally, you blow 2,000-something and get a service that lets you walk right in.

Can you really just walk in? Nope!

I got to the office at 9:30 and waited until 11:30 before there was a gap to squeeze me in. Appointments still come first;

after all, they have to look after the people who booked properly. The security guard said Mondays and Fridays are especially busy,

so if you're going to walk in, better avoid those days.

🌟Biometrics:

Next you go to the small room on the right for your photo. The rule is that your ears and eyebrows must show,

so before you head out, bring a black hair clip to pin your hair back or use some hairspray.

They do have a mirror and comb there if you need a quick rescue.

Maybe from overuse, I don't know, but my fingerprints are very faint and it took four scans to get through.

Remember to use plenty of hand cream the week before so your fingerprints can grow back a bit.

You can relax a little about this part, though. They'll keep going until it works.

🌟 How it went for me:

It was scarily fast this year: documents resubmitted 8/11 ➡️ passport collected 8/18.

The lady at the office told me even she was shocked by how fast mine came back.

On the 14th they received only two envelopes from the processing side, and one of them was mine, even though I had only just submitted.

Having done both a German and a UK visa, a quick aside: the ladies handling UK visas are all super friendly and pretty, like angels.

When something goes wrong, they really work with you to find a fix.

One even told me I didn't need to buy the SMS service.

They're seriously! So! Nice! My wallet still hurt afterward, though.

I hope everyone's visa goes smoothly!

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