Sponsor application project

July 11, 2017

Introduction

It is the interesting journey to file a sponsor application project as a Canadian citizen. It is a lot of work and take some planning.

It is getting better to work on paper work preparation. But it takes some time to get more familiar with the process of the application.

Julia decided to file the sponsor application herself one week ago. Since she started the project last July, Julia knew that the most important thing is to prepare early and work hard to learn the process. Almost 12 months passed, Julia decided to stay focus on the task one or 2 weeks, stop working on algorithm practice, mocking interview, and then spent more time on her application.

Being a competitive programmer, there are a lot of things to learn. It cannot be finished in one or two weeks.

Her favorite philosophy is so surprising to match the following reading she had recently. She likes to share here and it may bring some good thoughts for future work. Why a software programmer should consider cooking at home?

From the article: Cooking At Home.

If weight loss is your goal, you’ll get better results by simply cooking everything at home and counting your calories. Exercise is great too, but it’s not nearly as effective as diet.

America is this bizarre place where everything we do seems to get filtered through some corporate entity that charges a convenience fee. Over the course of a lifetime, those convenience fees add up and result in each us spending more of our lives mandatory working for someone else.

We want a refreshing drink, so we buy a Coca Cola. But Coke has sugar and calories that make us fat, so we decide to get a gym membership to burn them off. Then we decide we need a nice new car to get to the gym, which adds all sorts of fees and insurance. It’s even worse if we decide to buy that car on credit — many of us do!

Most of our problems stem from a few simple choices. Those choices create a vicious cycle of consumption that forces us to spend our lives on things that don’t matter.

What happens if we drink water instead? What if we go on a run outside, or buy a cheap set of weights? What if we decide to walk more places instead of driving?

This is an article about cooking, but it might as well be an article about taking more control of your life in general.

Lessons learned

A smart programmer learns to write great code, but she likes to learn basics as well. Like cooking at home, and sports. She likes to learn to write down her lessons one a time, she likes to break a vicious cycle starting from 17 years ago.

Back to 1999, she only has 2 miles to drive to work, she bought a brand new car, sports utilities vehicle, even though Florida is such a flat terrain area to drive, and it is on the credit, a factory loan from Ford company. And she bought a 3 years Bally gym contract, she only showed up less than 20 times in 3 years. One time she got 20 dollars class inside the gym.

Back to 2008, She did take three time IELTS tests in 2008 in order to meet Canada immigration minimum score. She did 3 times in a row in 3 months time range and she achieved her goal. And six month later she got denial application result, then she started to appeal case over 10 months from January to October 2009, she did almost flunk her appeal against Canadian Federal court even though she did everything by herself, but she won the judge approval for a court date in June 2009.

Back to 2009, Julia got an offer to pay 1000 dollars and the immigration lawyer will write a letter for her to the immigration department to appeal her denial of decision in January 2009. Julia decided to write a letter by herself, and filed an appeal case by herself in 60 days after the denial. She worked on the appeal for leave more than 10 months, and got settle offer in Sept. 2009. It is a miracle that Julia did not go to the court and settle down outside the court. The statistics shows that 90% of case settles outside the court.

Through the immigration lawsuit, Julia knew how important it is to work with people very carefully, and gain the trust and support from the people. First time she understood that how important a judge can make a difference in her life. The Canadian immigration judge gave her a chance to go to the court even though she just learned to file the lawsuit document by herself, she studied over 20 immigration lawyers website, case studies. She tried to write down notes to help her to find laws, facts, where are the good arguments. It was so much fun to work on her own case through those months, she learned the first time she had to write document each step, and stayed focus on each step.

She understood that it is most important thing in the life called immigration, and it is very important to study every detail by herself even if she decides to ask the help from the full time consultant.

In 2017, Julia chose to work for herself instead of using licensed immigration consultant for sponsor application.

Best teacher is to learn your own mistake, experience failures, she likes to get the application file again as soon as possible. And also she likes to write down her process, so she can overcome her procrastination problem, learn how to get into the zone of filing, and preparing process.

Julia wrote a blog on July 1 Canada day, and then shifted her focus on the sponsor application instead of Hackerrank contests, and Leetcode algorithms, and mocking interviews after work and weekends. Being a responsible person, make a plan, and follow through the plan. That makes a person success, it does not matter if the project is algorithm and data structure practice, or other thing like sponsor application.