HossDelgado
Registered Users (C)
...and we just got the production email
Oh, man.
We just got the production email. What a relief. It just came as I was finishing my previous whale of a post.
Not to beat a dad horse but if you want 'lessons' from this story, I'd write:
1. To force yourself to look at the 'big picture' after a challenging interview, try to think about the interview from the IO's perspective. You punch in in the morning, you have to interview, say 5 or 6 nervous couples/families per day, and then you have mounds of paperwork to do afterwards... And then the cycle starts again the following weekday... for the next 20 years (or whatever) until retirement. I bet these IOs can almost immediately distinguish an unprepared, nervous couple from a fraudulent one.
An individual IO probably gets award plaques and minor pay bumps for being good at sniffing out fraud marriages, but also chastised for jumping at 'false positives.' It's likely a substantial waste of government resources to spend 2 hours Stokes interviewing couples who are legitimately married but poorly prepared or just plain nervous. Bottom line, Stokes are probably fairly rare and must originate from some big red flag. You can't eliminate red flags in your application, but you can mitigate them, I guess is what I'm trying to write.
2. These forums are great resources but they can warp your perspective, too. For example, a lot of the people here are very intense and laser-focused on their AoS packets. So the advice and perspective you get are from a very small subset of the AoS population. For example, a lot of people recommend dressing formally ('like for a job interview') for the interview. Looking around the waiting room, I'd say 75% of the people in were in sub-casual-wear. I'm talking baseball hats, jeans, old sneakers and hoodies.
What I'm trying to write, without much success, is that those of us the forum are so attentive to our applications that we stress about details that the average AoS person doesn't even know exists. It's great to be prepared, but there's also a point where over-preparing is harmful or needlessly stressful.
Time for some celebration food. Good luck to everyone!
Oh, man.
We just got the production email. What a relief. It just came as I was finishing my previous whale of a post.
Not to beat a dad horse but if you want 'lessons' from this story, I'd write:
1. To force yourself to look at the 'big picture' after a challenging interview, try to think about the interview from the IO's perspective. You punch in in the morning, you have to interview, say 5 or 6 nervous couples/families per day, and then you have mounds of paperwork to do afterwards... And then the cycle starts again the following weekday... for the next 20 years (or whatever) until retirement. I bet these IOs can almost immediately distinguish an unprepared, nervous couple from a fraudulent one.
An individual IO probably gets award plaques and minor pay bumps for being good at sniffing out fraud marriages, but also chastised for jumping at 'false positives.' It's likely a substantial waste of government resources to spend 2 hours Stokes interviewing couples who are legitimately married but poorly prepared or just plain nervous. Bottom line, Stokes are probably fairly rare and must originate from some big red flag. You can't eliminate red flags in your application, but you can mitigate them, I guess is what I'm trying to write.
2. These forums are great resources but they can warp your perspective, too. For example, a lot of the people here are very intense and laser-focused on their AoS packets. So the advice and perspective you get are from a very small subset of the AoS population. For example, a lot of people recommend dressing formally ('like for a job interview') for the interview. Looking around the waiting room, I'd say 75% of the people in were in sub-casual-wear. I'm talking baseball hats, jeans, old sneakers and hoodies.
What I'm trying to write, without much success, is that those of us the forum are so attentive to our applications that we stress about details that the average AoS person doesn't even know exists. It's great to be prepared, but there's also a point where over-preparing is harmful or needlessly stressful.
Time for some celebration food. Good luck to everyone!
I'm glad everything worked for you.