O-1 Visa Recommendation Letter For Immigration
If you have ten people you can ask to write you an immigration letter of recommendation, it does not mean you should ask all of them. Additionally, if you only know three people who will write you visa recommendation letters, that can be enough. This article will help you plan and strategize for who to ask to write you a letter of recommendation for immigration and how to meet the significant recognition requirement with as little as 3 recommendation letters, based on these 4 considerations: 1) the expert’s qualifications, 2) the expert’s familiarity with your work, 3) how much the expert likes you, and 4) how much the expert likes your work.
Expert’s Qualifications – Choose someone who has at least one or more of the following: distinguished education, awards, distinguished clients, and strong online search results.
Distinguished Education means the went to an Ivy League School, Top Design School, School with Distinguished Alumni, or a school name most people outside the industry are familiar with as being top for the industry. They need to have won some award; it does not have to be the most prestigious but there are some select criteria they need to have met to receive the award. They should have some household, instant recognition named clients in their portfolio – names that even someone who knows nothing about the industry might have heard about somewhere. They need to be all over the internet so that when someone Google’s their name, articles and photos of the person come up. The more photos that come up, the better because photos make the person real to the USCIS officer and help establish the Expert’s qualifications; and within a minute, the officer is convinced that the expert is an expert. The expert does not need to have all of these qualifications but at least one.
Expert’s Familiarity With Your Work
The expert has to discuss your work in the expert letter. Therefore, the expert needs to have personally worked with you, hired you for a project, or has seen a portfolio of your work and can provide an expert evaluation of your talent based on your work. They need to be able to articulate their familiarity with your work and not just state that they think you are extraordinary because you asked them to write a letter of recommendation.
How Much the Expert Likes You
Get an immigration letter of recommendation from someone who really likes you
as a person, even if they are not the most distinguished in your list of people to ask, over someone, who is the most distinguished but you don’t have a personal connection with. Why? Sometimes an expert has very high qualifications but they are really busy, they just are not that excited to write the visa recommendation letter, or want you to draft it and they just want to sign something. Someone who really likes you as a person will make the time to write the letter, they will add details that will make the letter stand out, and will be open to revisions. This is really important because then the letter will not be a generic letter that acts as a letter of recommendation for immigration but rather, become a form of evidence that will create an argument for why your application should be approved.
How Much the Expert Likes Your Work
On the flip side, if there is an expert who you only have a professional relationship with but really love your work, get an expert letter from that person and have the visa recommendation letter focus on their familiarity with your work and what they love about it, and how that makes you extraordinary. They don’t have to love you to love your work; their love for your work will motivate them to write a strong letter.