My exhibit list got better when I stopped treating it like storage
My final EB-1A petition had 40 exhibits. That number only tells half the story.
Topic
Immigration
A collection of 14 issues
Prestige is context. Responsibility is proof.
A famous venue is not proof. A famous company is not proof.
The first thing my EB-1A had to explain was my field
Before my EB-1A petition could explain why I was extraordinary, it had to explain what field I was extraordinary in. That sounds obvious. It was not obvious to me at the start.
The 13-year timeline I drew before I wrote a word of my final merits section
Before I wrote my final merits section, I drew a timeline.
Not in a fancy tool. A list, in a Google Doc, by year, from 2011 to 2024.
For each year, one line for every concrete thing on record: a press piece, a launched program, a judging invitation, an award,
I had Forbes coverage from 12 years ago. Here's how I used it as EB-1A evidence.
In December 2011, Forbes ran an article called "Can't meet Eric Schmidt in Paris at LeWeb'11!? No Worries." It covered an event I had organized called the LeWeb Student Warm-up, held just before the main LeWeb conference in Paris. I was 22.
Seven months
Your lawyer sees bullet points. You see the whole journey.
When people hire an EB-1A lawyer, they expect the lawyer to find the story.
That is not what happens.
A lawyer reads what you give them. A few pages of CV, a list of achievements, maybe a LinkedIn URL. From that, they have to reverse-engineer a long career into a
7 things I did before writing a single paragraph of my petition
7 things I did before writing a single paragraph of my petition
Most people think petition writing starts with writing.
It does not.
The writing was the easy part. Everything that made the writing easy happened before I typed a single paragraph of my cover letter.
Here are the seven
6 months from now, will you still be "researching"?
Let me ask you something uncomfortable. Six months from now, where will you be in this visa journey?
The 3 outcomes you actually want from your visa process
When people talk about EB-1A, EB-2 NIW, or O-1, they usually talk about "the process": forms, criteria, evidence, timelines. But when you're the one doing it, you don't want a process.
You can't edit a blank page
The biggest thing holding most EB-1A candidates back isn't a lack of qualifications. It's the absence of a draft.
There's research. There's notes. There are bookmarked success stories and saved Reddit threads and half-finished Notion pages. But there's no draft.