UK work visa: a couple of answers

St. Andrews Cathedral, Scotland

As we settle in her and begin to explore, there are many things I'd like to blog about. However, I think I'm going to start with a brief post about the thing I searched for when I first found out we would be moving to the UK, which was...VISAS. Getting a visa from the UK government was not exactly a transparent process. It worked out fine at the end, but the things I wish I'd known are the following:

1. Yes, your visa might take up to 12 weeks to be issued and the "average" visa processing time might be 4 weeks. BUT it could happen much faster. Like approved for all four of us, 2 adults and 2 children, in 5 business days. 
2. Related to that, if you are going on a limited-time work visa, you are allowed to be the UK for 4 weeks around your start/end dates. On your visa application, you have to specify the date you will travel.  Of course, they tell you NOT to book your plane tickets until you have the visa, so it's really just a guess of how long it'll take to process the visa application. Given our experience of getting visas almost immediately, and then being unable to travel for 3 weeks until the visa was valid, I recommend assuming the best and asking for a travel date (aka visa start date) that you would like - like 2 weeks in advance of your work start date - even if it doesn't seem feasible that the visa will come through that fast. You may be surprised.
3. Also, after you put in your visa application, you have to make an appointment to have biometric data taken  - despite having to make appointments on two different days, the biometric folks were able to accommodate us and take our information all on the same day so we could submit our visa applications together. It never hurts to ask. 

Good luck!  

Changing Direction

The title of this post, changing direction, has multiple meanings.  For those of you who read this blog before, it used to be about my experiences of being a new mother with Audrey, who is now 5.  We've added Claire to the family too since then, and most pertinent for this blog, we've moved to Scotland for me to take a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Dundee in Dundee, Scotland.

In the few years since I've been blogging, this site (Blogger) has changed too.  I guess it was always part of the Google universe, but now it's more explicitly so, trying to get me to "sign in to all of Google" with my gmail account, and encouraging me to tag people (well, they don't call it tag, it's something else more google-ish like "call out") on my blog posts so they'll be flagged on Google+, which still seems a little Facebook-wanna-be to me. But part of my job now at Dundee is to consider current use of online/social media, and start thinking about the future of it as well, so I'll give Google+ the benefit of the doubt.

So as I change direction, I return to this blog.  I write for myself, but also to explain to family and friends (and other readers, although I doubt even if I link this blog to Google+, I'll be overrun with readers :-) exactly how Scotland is different, even though the US and Scotland are both 1st world, English speaking countries.  So it's really one part venting, one part information and one part anthropology. Hope you enjoy this trifecta.

    Sunset over Magdalen Green, near our house in Dundee: October 2013