I've gone to my Visa appointment and will be picking it up in a few days. I'll be leaving on the 25th. Potential applicants to SITE should know that if you are accepted you won't be able to head to Italy until late September. Here is a snippet from one of the emails we were sent at the beginning of May:
"Contact the Italian Consulate at the very beginning of August. Please note that you must call the Consulate which pertains to your jurisdiction and make an appointment with them for 10 -15 September (not earlier, as the immigration quota are not published until end August/beginning of September, so the Consulate is not ready to issue visas before the beginning of September. Keep in mind that you cannot travel before being issued a visa, which will not happen before September. We suggest booking your flight for the 25-29 September, not before. ALSO, remember to book a roundtrip ticket (you need to have a return flight in order to get the visa, and a return for Christmas is considered a roundtrip)."
My visa appointment went great, mainly because I asked SITE to put me in touch with other people in the my area who had been accepted to the program as well. We made sure to double-check with each other which materials we were bringing so none of us showed up with an incomplete application.
Note: If any of you out there are reading this in preparation for your own visa appointments, I just thought you should know that the employees will be speaking to you in English. I know it is the Italian consulate, but this is really dry, bureaucratic stuff and no one expects you to have the vocabulary to talk about it in Italian! Also, the appointment from start to finish probably lasts about 5-10 minutes. You will be in and out. I should also mention that I'm talking about the Boston consulate and don't have any experience with consulates in other cities.
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
aka
Home of the Consulate
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