The best way to answer one of the most common questions at your F1 Student Visa Interview

I'm an ex-visa officer, and if you're applying for an F visa, the visa officer might ask you why you chose that university to attend in the U.S. Many of my clients, they ask me, how should I answer that question? Well, that answer is going to be specific to you. I'll tell you first what a bad answer sounds like. A bad answer is an answer that's not personal to you. Many students, they'll prepare an answer to that question that sounds something like this. Oh, I chose this university because they have a great program in my major. There's a 12 to 1 student to faculty ratio. They have an endowment of $20 million, et cetera, et cetera. The campus is 35 acres. These are all facts about the university. That's true. However, they're not personal to you. Anyone could read those facts from the university's website. They could go onto Wikipedia and find out that information, but it doesn't tell the visa officer anything about you personally. It just tells them why that university may be a good university. Now, a better answer is going to be probably the true answer, which is that you have a personal reason, a simple reason, even a trivial reason why you chose that university. Maybe you know a friend who went to that university and they recommended it. Maybe you went to a university career fair and you talked to a few universities there and one of the recruiters from that university really made a good impression on you. Maybe you don't like cold weather, so you looked at universities that are in the south in the warmer weather. Maybe you made your decision based on the program length. Maybe one program was three years instead of four and you wanted to spend less time in school. Whatever the reason that's real and personal to you is going to be a much better answer. Now, the visa officer may ask you a lot of other questions. We've got a lot of videos. You can click the link and you can go to some of our other videos to find out tips for the other questions and the general strategy for the visa interview, but to really prepare the best, a consultation with a former visa officer is going to be the best way that you're going to be able to prepare for your visa interview. So let us know in the comments what university you're applying to, what university you have gotten an I-24 and that you're going to apply for your visa for. We'd like to know where you're planning to go to school in the US.