AB's Reflections

Tag: Relocation

  • Dubai Diaries: The Dubai move and Golden Visa

    Dubai Diaries: The Dubai move and Golden Visa

    It’s been exactly 2 years since I joined my regional role in Boehringer Ingelheim in Dubai. I rarely blog about my personal life, but I thought now would be a good time to share some of the experiences around this move.

    The move to Dubai was in itself fairly straight forward as it was through an internal move. I started off with a regular employment based residence visa valid for 2 years. My family also relocated in the middle of last year, and their visas were completed through the office pretty quickly.

    Since my visa was due for renewal this year, I decided to opt for the UAE Golden Visa for salaried professionals which has a relatively easier qualification qualification criteria than the others:

    • Monthly gross salary of AED 30,000 or higher (that seems to be the current consensus, as I have also read of it being the basic salary without allowances in the past)
    • Bachelor’s degree or higher
      • Getting the equivalency certificate for this is typically the most time consuming process

    While my application was managed by my office in DIFC which definitely helped with the clarity around the process, I did find this recent Reddit post by the Amer Centre quite helpful and along with this article in Khaleej Times that explains the process and documentation requirements. I am sharing a simple guide to get the necessary documents ready based on my experience.

    Step by step guide

    The overall process took about 2 months for me, out of which the first 3 weeks went in getting the degree equivalency certificate, followed by 2 weeks for the degree physical attestation and about 2 weeks for the actual visa application, health checkup & Emirates ID issuance.

    You need digitized versions of the following key documents for the application (some like the equivalency certificate require additional documents for the verification) in addition to other documents from your employer:

    • Degree equivalency certificate
    • Bank statement showing the salary credit each month
    • Attested degree certificate (UAE Embassy in university country and MOFA in UAE)
    • NOC from company
    • Current passport and visa
    • Current passport sized photo (white background, no glasses – you can tell the photo studio for the Emirates ID or visa version)

    The equivalency certificate

    Getting the degree equivalency certificate is usually the bottleneck in this process, based on the experience of my colleagues and those who have shared their experience online.

    The process is as below with details on the Ministry site here (they also have a useful document checklist that you can refer to):

    Typically you would need your original degree certificate, the final transcript (official stamped marksheet for the entire duration of the course) and your passport copy. You need to choose one of the official partners (Dataflow or Quadrabay at the moment) for the verification and share these documents with them. It costs around AED 350 for this part of the process.

    The turnaround time is slated to be 30 days, but is completely dependent on the response time of the university. Here are a couple of tips to help speed up the process which worked for me:

    • Keep the details of your university alumni association and key academic departments handy.
    • Once the initial documents have been verified by the partner and sent to the university, if you do not get any update within a couple of weeks check in with the customer support for details regarding the communication with the university.
      • I managed to get the details of the email subject line and the department to which they had mailed this way.
    • Contact the alumni association or academic department with the details you got regarding the verification communication to nudge it along.

    Once the verification process is successfully completed, you will get the notification to complete the application on the Ministry site with the appropriate link. There is another payment involved, and the certificate is generated almost immediately. This completes the most time consuming part of the application.

    Degree attestation and next steps

    The next few steps are quite straight forward, and you could even get the degree attestation done while you are waiting for the verification to happen. You will of course need the physical degree certificate for this, and use an agency like VFS (they have an attestation helpline that you can mail here) to get this done in 2-3 weeks with doorstep pickup and drop-off.

    Once you have these documents you can go ahead with the actual visa application. A few additional tips:

    • In the bank statement (an online statement download should be fine), highlight the salary deposits and make sure that your name & account details are there on every page & highlight those as well.
    • If you are immediately transferring your salary to another account after the deposit, you may need to provide the statement from the other account as well.
    • The photo you submit will be used in the visa and Emirates ID, so you can ask the photo studio to take it accordingly.
    • You will probably be given a slot for the health checkup, but depending on your location you may be able to walk in for the checkup much earlier.
    • Ensure that you are setup on UAE pass so that the authentication on the partner sites is easier.
    • Setup your ICP app as well do that you can access the digital versions of your visa and updated Emirates ID. This uses UAE pass as well for login.
    • Depending on how you have applied, you may need to get the new Emirates ID re-issued.
    • You will need to transfer your dependents’ visas at some point in time as well.

    Hope this helped you, and wish you the best with your Golden Visa application! If this gets a good response, I’ll share some of my experiences and learnings around the Dubai relocation.

  • Settling down at SOM – I

    The last one and a half months since the orientation programme for the new entrants to the PG courses in IIT Bombay have been very eventful and really hectic. In fact, the first term is almost over and the end term examinations are scheduled to begin within a week (the management course divides each semester into two terms of around 7 weeks each). I guess it is about time I posted my experiences during this period.

    Hostel – from one room to another

    The hostels were allotted on the day of the orientation itself. However, the increase in student intake for the IITs seems to be straining the infrastructure quite hard as we got rooms on a shared basis, i.e., single rooms with double occupancy. Then again, construction is underway for a new hostel (scheduled for completion in 2010, so won’t be of much use to us) and there are talks of expanding some of the existing hostels.

    One of the interesting aspects of our hostel accommodation is that our entire batch was accommodated in the same hostel, thanks to our HOD and seniors, which is indeed a bonus considering the fact that we have numerous groups activities. In the initial room that I was allotted, I had a local resident for a roommate, and things were going fine till the roof started leaking after 4 consecutive days of rainfall. I subsequently moved to another room in the same wing, and now both my former roommate and I have individual rooms :-). So, I guess roof leaks are not that bad after all.

    The first room that I got also had its share of peculiarities other than the roof leak. The former resident had decided to generously leave behind his philosophies in life on the various surfaces that he could find. Here’s a sample:

    Hostel Room

    In fact, the new room I got also had some philosophy on the walls, but fortunately in pencil. So, I put my eraser to good use.

    LAN connections

    With double occupancy of single rooms comes the problem of LAN connectivity, as there is only one port per room. However, one of the advantages of being a management student is that you’ll be using a laptop rather than a desktop. This is where network bridges and wireless ad hoc networks come in handy. To get two or more laptops connected to the LAN through a singe hub, just do the following on the machine connected to the LAN:

    1. Create a network bridge using the LAN and wireless connections
    2. Provide the TCP settings (IP, gateway, DNS servers etc) for the LAN in the network bridge if required
    3. Create an ad hoc wireless network, and connect to this. This step is very easy in Windows Vista, but a bit tricky under XP (steps provided in this article). Also note that some of the security and encryption settings provided for the ad hoc network may not be supported on older OSes, so you might need to opt for an open network

    Once this network is setup, the TCP settings (same as the LAN settings) need to be configured in the other machines before connecting to the network. Once connected, the LAN should be accessible.

    I made a small screencast too (for Windows Vista)

    (You can also check it out directly on viddler)

    Incidentally, I got myself a Lenovo Ideapad Y510 on my first weekend in the hostel (can’t live for long without a computer I guess). Not only did it get me connected to the internet after almost a week without connectivity, but also provided my first encounter with Vista. And I must say that I like Vista over XP, especially the search.

  • Goodbye Kolkata, Hello Mumbai

    I spent the last 3 years working in Kolkata, and now it is time to take the next step in my career. I will be joining the Master of Management program in the Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay. It is a 2 year, full time residential course.

    July 1st was my last working day in IBM, and I really enjoyed my work there. I had started off as a campus recruit, with my Entry Level Training Program (ELTP) starting on 22nd July 2005. The training lasted for about a month and a half. I got into a project (Model Driven Business Transformation – MDBT) in September itself as the training was wrapping up. In fact, I continued in the same project throughout my stay in IBM – so not much variety there.

    Coming to the project – MDBT started off as a research project in IBM T J Watson Research with the aim of modelling a business process and translating it to a solution and generating a platform-specific IT implementation with customizations along the way. The basic idea is to empower a business analyst with the ability to develop applications for a business process.

    There were 8-10 people in the project when I started, and we reached a peak size of around 15 about a year ago. My role in the project was initially that of a developer, collaborating with colleagues from the IBM labs (Watson, IRL – Delhi, ISL – Pune) to customize the generated applications for different projects. I also travelled to the Watson Research in Yorktown Heights, NY (my first trip outside India) in February-March 2007, to interact with the clients and gather requirements. I was also involved the design and development of one of the modules of the MDBT toolkit responsible for code generation over the last year.

    The project gave me the chance to explore and try out different technologies, and get to understand some of the current popular areas like SOA and MDA. Apart from the project work, I also got the opportunity to network with my colleagues around the world, and started blogging seriously (but not that regularly I suppose).

    From a personal side of things, my stay in Kolkata was even better as this was the first time I got to reside in my native place. I got to spend 3 years amid my relatives, attend social functions and get to know everyone better. In fact, I had opted for my job posting on Kolkata with this aim in mind. I got to stay with my grandfather who was living alone since my grandmother passed away in December, 1999. I will be taking away a lot of precious memories from my stay in Kolkata.

    All said and done, it was a very fruitful stay, and it is time to take the next step. Mumbai will make it 3 out of 4 metros in which I have resided (Chennai and Kolkata being the other 2), with Delhi the only one left.