Eb1/or, Nsc, Rfe

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Registered Users (C)
Hello everyone,

Finally I received an RFE from NSC after some delays since filing petition (university sponsored) in early october 99. RFE states the usual requirement for EB1 and to provide support for the fact that I have international acclaim as a researcher. This is a little surprising to me as I am working at a leading research lab (in my field) in Germany (for last 1.5 years) since I finished PhD from a US university. Well thats INS..

My lawyer advised me get more supporting letters from "experts in the field". I would appreciate comments from readers of this board who to get letters from and what to have them write. To be more precise,

support letters from bigshots with big CVs, may not be written in exactly the way I want. whereas from my peers or boss or colaborators I can have them write pretty much anything which is mathematically not wrong. But such people may not have the best resume. Any advise on who should write the letter would be helpful. also comments are welcome for any critical sentencing required in those letters.

When I filed the petition, I had a US ms and Phd and 1 year post PhD experience in Germany (very reputed boss). 8 papers, 2 book chapters, 1 US patent application, 1 US level award (best graduate student paper), one international award for best paper (co-author), 5 expert letters (3 US, 1 Germany, 1 India), 3 honor societies, 3-4 professional society membership, judje of others work at 1 occassion, and some magazine clippings talking about my work by technical journalists.

Any comments or suggestions would be helpful in preparing my reply to the rfe.

Thnaks
 
No Title

I think the difficulty with your ref letters is that they are from
the three places where you have been during your career and written by people who you already know: India, Germany, USA. Get ref. letters from people in other countries, who can act as unbiased referees for your work. Make sure that they sprinkle your letter with liberal doses of words like: outstanding, extraordinary and excellent. Also, it wouldnt hurt to say that you are in the top x% of researchers in your field and how your work has made significant improvements over prior art. Another neat trick in getting reference letters is that
you can use them to jack up the significance of your awards/accomplishments ... for example, to highlight the odds
in getting a best paper award and who you competed against etc.
Also the letter should have a section outlining the accomplishments
of the guy who wrote the letter for you ... this is very important.

I dont think big shots will have much difficulty giving you a good
ref. letter provided that you approach the subject in the right way.
I got ref. letters from people that I only met once at a conference
or who reviewed just one of my papers etc. The way that I went about this is:

(a) Explain to them that you need a letter to beat the INS red tape. Nearly all of them were very sympathetic.

(b) Send them a draft reference letter that you yourself wrote ... make sure you make the letters different enough. Let them know that
they are free to change the language, but should stick to the format.
Unlike your reasoning above, I found that most people gave me a letter in exactly the same format of the draft letter. The only
person who "toned down" the reference letter was surprisingly a guy
who I knew quite well ... so I dont think your concerns that the big shots will be reluctant to give you a letter are well founded.

Not one person that I contacted refused to write me a reference letter ... so write to a large number of people who you know even
remotely and ask them in the right way.

Other tips:

* Include any papers that you published after the 140 submission
* Quote the juicy excerpts from the reference letters in your
cover letter and if you have not done this before, try to address
the significance of each of your accomplishments in your cover letter.

Best of Luck.
 
No Title

Thanks for your time and very useful tips. I am also told by another person to get letter from an "independent reviewer" who you "dont know". At the time I filed the petition I was unaware of this fact (and my lawyer did not bring this up either). I will make sure I get such letters this time.

Thanks again
 
No Title

Check if your attorney filed a covering document which talks about all your work and your references etc. I have done EB1 twice. one under EA, which got rejected because of the smae issues you had and my attorney screwed up, and then under OR which went through.

Make sure in all you refernce letter, adjectives like extra ordinary etc are crearly mentioned. My new attorney insisted on this.

The more reference you get the better.

Good luck!
 
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