J-1 Visa/Career Training Programme to work in USA?

jas0607 · #1 (**permalink**) 28th November 2007, 01:45 PM

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for any experienced expats or knowledgeable folk to give me some advice please.

My girlfriend and I are hoping to go to the US at some point next year for a sustained period of time. We would want to work whilst there. Our situation is this: we are British citizens aged 23 and 24, we both have undergraduate degrees - Honours in Marketing for her, and Joint Honours in Marketing and Media for me, we have both just graduated (November 2007) from our postgrad Masters in Business and Information Systems Technology. We also both have around/at least a year's work experience relevant to our degrees.

Now we both want to experience America, and work there for a while. I have lots of family (cousins/uncles and aunts etc) in L.A, and have visited a number of times on holiday. I loved my time there, so now want to go back for a while. So ideally, we'd like to be based around L.A, or West Coast in general.

I have tried to research the options myself, but I'm quite overwhelmed with information and would like some real world/experienced advice. It seems that the J1 Visa is suited to our situation, would this be the best bet? This also seems to have the choice of Career Training, or Internship? Finally, I've concluded that we have to go through a 3rd party/sponsoring organisation - e.g the one that keeps coming up is RealGap. Any thoughts or recommendations on these companies? From searching forums I see a few complaints and claims that they are "scams" and so on, so that worries me!

Many thanks for reading, and apologies for such a wordy post!

Jason.

synthia · #2 (**permalink**) 30th November 2007, 07:03 AM

Welcome to the forum. Do you need to earn money while in the US? Training programs and internships may cost you money or provide unpaid or poorlly paid positions. Internships are frequently for students pursuing a degree.

Since you have just graduated, you may be eligible for a BUNAC visa. Actually, I think it has another name but one of the organizations that manage it is BUNAC. These are five-month visas for students an those that have just graduated.