Your petition is new. Your record is not.

My EB-1A petition used media coverage published from 2011 to 2018.

I filed in 2024.

I had not spent those earlier years building an immigration exhibit list. I was building programs, organizing events, and doing the work that later became part of the record.

That distinction matters when you feel late to the petition process.

The drafting project may be new.

Your career is not.

Do not judge the age of your evidence by the date you opened your first petition document.

Look backward.

• Which projects have a public record?
• Which roles can former colleagues describe from direct knowledge?
• Which articles, invitations, awards, program pages, or event records still identify what happened?
• Which facts can you preserve now, even if you did not collect them at the time?

Older material still has to be relevant, identifiable, and connected to the claim you are making. Age does not remove that work.

But starting the petition today does not mean your evidence starts today.

Write down two dates:

1. When did I begin preparing this petition?
2. How far back does my documented work actually go?

The gap between those dates is not automatically lost time.

It is the record you now need to find, sort, and explain.