Visitor Visa - B2

We are a family of four. My husband is a surgeon, I am a hospital administrator, my 19yr old son and 14yr old daughter are students. We had applied for a visa in 2005 since my husband attends international conferences all the time but at that time we were granted only a one yr visa. The interview itself had lasted for over 15 mins with the VO questioning my daughter(then 11) for a major part of the interview. For a 10.30 interview, we were made to wait in the hall from 10am and our name was called only at 2.30pm! We were kind of put off by the whole experience of preparing documents, spending the entire day for the interview (my husband can ill afford to waste his time sitting around all day !!)

This time there was an important conference and after going thro the other experiences at immihelp, I decided to try applying again for a visa. Prepared all the documents as mentioned in the website and took an interview appt. Our time was 8.30 and to our pleasant surprise, we were taken exactly on time. Immediately after our fingerprinting, our name was called out. And the interview (if we can call it that!!) lasted less than a minute!! The VO was a lady and we greeted her pleasantly good morning. She was extremely friendly. She had not even opened our papers and enquired if we had ever been out of India. We had mentioned the list of all the countries that we had visited in the last 10yrs on our form, so I guess she had not been through the papers. We told her yes and that we had been to the US too. She said : "Oh I'm so glad you want to go back there again! Okay, I'm just processing your visa." Then she went through the computer , I think she must be checking our form. As she was doing that she joked with my 14yr old daughter if she had a credit card for her shopping in the US. Thats it! She did not ask for a single document though I had carried a huge file with all possible documents. I have a feeling that they must be going through our forms prior to the interview and judging genuine candidates from the potential immigrants.

I collected our passports yesterday evening. My husband, my son and I were granted a 10 yr visa while my daughter was given a 5 yr visa. Thanks to immihelp for providing me with the moral support to apply for the visa.