Waiver for "2-year rule"?

[Caladan 19]

F-1s aren't subject to the rule. And it's not all Js, either. It has to do mostly with the source of the funding and sometimes the nature of the degree (i.e., they want to encourage U.S.-trained doctors to return home.) Fs can switch, if they find a sponsor, to an H1-B pretty easily so you're in the clear if you have an F.

Here's a helpful link that explains some of this.

[NY_IZMIR 1]

Caladan is right,

My wife had a J-1 2 year home residency requirement. She came to the states in January 2006, stayed for 3 months doing a research project that NYU and The Science Council of Turkey help fund. Since government money was used, it's sort of a, yes we're letting you goto the states, but we want some insurance that you're not gonna just stay there, and use your skills/knowledge back here at home.

Anyway, my wife returned back home in April 2006 and when we realized the 2 year home residency requirement, we immediately filed for a no-objection based waiver. The process for Turkey is two-fold.

1. File for a waiver with the states department. Application is filled up online.

2. Send some parts of that form that's generated to the Turkish Consulate in Washington D.C. along with a letter stating your case, and the usual Turkish requirements for stamps and envelopes

Then you wait for the Turkish consulate to gather the required docs from all parties that were involved in your funding. Once they do that, they will email you saying that they've created the no-objection statement and have sent it to the State Department. We were scared that this piece was going to take a while, but to our suprise it only took a month for this part.

Then we waited for the state department and that took about 45 days. Overall, we filed at the end of August and had our no-objection based waiver approved and everything settled by mid november.

Hope your process goes smoothly. We were pleasantly surprised that, that part of our visa journey went smoothly.

Let me know if you have any questions.