I move to New York City in July with my soon-to-be fiance and while we're very excited, the amount work required in order to make it happen is staggering
I'm doing a masters in computer science, and its already taken me about 9 months to pull that off, but we still have to:
- Get the university documentation I need for a visa
- Get a Visa
- Work out if shipping all our stuff to the USA is cost effective
- Realize it isn't
- Sell everything we can't fit into 4 (large) suitcases
- Sell more stuff when we realize the suitcases weigh three times the allowed limit
- Cancel all our phone bills / electricitiy bills / internet bills / etc
- Sell the car (already done!)
- Move out of our London flat
- Find somewhere to stay until our flights (Thanks Rob)
- Fly out
- Move in
- Realize we forgot something important
- Realize we're going to have about 1/2 the space we had in London
Costs
We thought it would be pretty cost effective to ship all our stuff by freight, you know because it takes 2-3 months and your stuff could get covered in sea water, but we were quoted £400 just to ship 5 regular moving boxes. Thats insane.
Bearing in mind that its costing us $30,000 a year for me to do a masters we need every penny we can get.
Crazy
You'd also think that a university such as NYU (which has 45% international students) would have a process in place for registering with various national governments as a provider of education. Apparently they missed that lecture, and instead I have to deal with administration offices who have absolutely no idea.
I'm trying to get them to register with the UK Learning and skills council (so the UK government will give me an interest-paid loan). Its already taken me a month of talking to one office after another, and they still haven't managed to fill in the 2 page form. I keep getting responses like "we don't think we can participate in that scheme" and "we don't understand the requirements", but what they really mean is "We can't be bothered".
Excited Regardless
All this stuff will go away in a few months so I'm not going to let myself get worked up. Instead I think I'll just dig in the the final push, because this next year could well be the best year of my life.