I built a visa timeline planner because I got tired of being scared of a calendar

2026-07-29 · Yusuf Gadelrab

Note on status: I confirm my own current immigration status in writing on request rather than summarising it here, where it would go stale. The post is kept as written because the planner, and the advice in it, are useful to anyone whose clock is running.

When I wrote this I was on TD status, it ended when I turned 21, and I was 20. There was a whole sequence of things that had to happen in a specific order before then, and every explanation of that sequence I could find was either a law firm's marketing page or a forum post from 2019.

Putting the timeline on a page

So I put the timeline on a page. Filing windows, what depends on what, how the pieces interact with an internship search that starts a year before the internship.

It's free, it collects nothing, and it is emphatically not legal advice. It's a planning aid. I still take the real questions to the free immigration attorney my school provides, which is a resource an enormous number of international students don't know they have.

https://yusuf-gadelrab.github.io/visa.html

The anxiety is mostly from the fog

If you're an international student in the US, two things: find out today whether your school has a free immigration attorney, and put your own deadlines on one page where you can look at them. The anxiety is mostly from the fog, not the dates.