This post will describe all that has to be done after you receive your admit news and the scholarship package until you send your financial documents to the school for securing the I-20. In the larger scheme of things, the first thing to do at this stage is to do everything that will help you secure your I-20.
Step1: Pay the acceptance fees by the deadline.
Step2: Figure out the amount of funds that you gotta arrange.
For the I-20, the school requires you to show them enough funds for the first year of your study at the school. This includes the tuition fees and the living expenses minus any scholarship that you may have got. Let's take an example to illustrate it:
Tuition fees (per academic year) = 44,300 USD
Living Expenses (per academic year) = 18,000 USD
Misc. Expenses (as per the estimate sheet) = 1,700 USD
Total Expenses for the I year = 64,000 USD
Scholarship received (per academic year) = 15,000 USD
Balance amount (per academic year) = 64K - 15K = 49K USD
Now, this 49K USD figure is the amount of funds that you gotta arrange in order to secure your I-20. This amount has to be a liquid asset which in other words means that the source of the funds can be fixed deposits, savings or a loan. Anything that is readily cashable without any hassle will normally fall under the liquid asset category.
Step3: Ok, now that you've zeroed in on the figure, the next step is to actually arrange them.
For those of us who are not already CEOs, ~50K USD is in no way a small deal. So, we invariably end up taking help from another person, be it your father or relative or friend. Now, when somebody else is gonna spend for your education, that person becomes your sponsor. And a sponsor needs to provide some kind of an assurance in writing that he/she is willing to sponsor your education indeed. This is where an affidavit of support comes into the picture.
"An affidavit of support is nothing but just a letter of guarantee from your sponsor. It is a written statement that your sponsor is making to assure to the university/visa officer that he/she is willing to sponsor your education. Now, that in itself is not sufficient. Your sponsor also needs to show where from is he/she gonna conjure up the funds. So, this requires bank statements or other such evidences of the availability of funds with the sponsor. That, in a nutshell, means affidavit + bank statements - both!"The affidavit of support and the bank statements (or any other form of evidence of financial support) together constitute the financial evidence of support.
There are two ways to show the funds available in your bank account.
1) Get a letter from your bank manager stating the amount of funds present in your account. It will be good if you make the manager mention that the letter is being issued for the purpose of your education. But it's not mandatory.
OR
2) Just get the current bank statement of your account, for example a statement for the past one month. This will be a dot matrix printout from the bank mostly. You don't need any affidavit of support to mention that it's for your education.
If you are showing somebody else's account, then you need the things said above plus the affidavit of support from that somebody.
Note that you can also use a loan sanction letter (if at all you manage to get one before you get your I-20 which is almost close to impossible in nationalized banks in India) to get your I-20.
Step4: The fact that you've come to this step indicates that you're done with arranging your finance. Read the next post to proceed further.
PS: This post may be updated as and when it requires an updation regarding the procedures.
