Just like everyone else, I too am busy packing my bags as the D-day finally comes close. I've been preparing since the last 2-3 months thinking I'll be relaxed during these last days I have at home. However, to my chagrine, I'm far from relaxed. My suitcases are out, patiently waiting to be loaded with everything I'll be carrying for the trip to LA, but I'm busy running around to cross out a few remaining crucial to-do items from my list. While I don't intend to bore you to death with all the minute details, I think it'll surely help to share a part of my list here for posterity. So here they go:
(Source)
1. First and foremost, catching up with friends and relatives! While its ideal to meet as many people as you can before you leave, sometimes its not humanly possible, especially if like me, one has been working through the last month before departure. Since my last day was only last week and I fly in 4 days, I had to make a lot of compromises here - catching up with only the closest family members and friends who live somewhere close to where I am.
2. Completing post-resignation formalities is a an onerous task. In my case, it involved returning the company assets (laptops, etc.) back, submitting all pending travel claims and shooting off mails to expedite their payment, saying goodbye to colleagues and writing keep-in-touch emails, saving all the soft assets that till now were readily available on the corporate intranet, handing over tax-related documentation for the processing of the final settlement, and several small things I cannot even remember. Therefore,my advice is to resign as early as you can. Do not, i repeat do not, put off resignation till the last moment, and make sure your last working day is at least a month before your departure date.
3. Shopping!! I'm sure this is something almost everyone's busy doing at the last moment, no matter how much in advance you prepare a shopping list. And whew- what a tiring experience this been! Having lived away from home, I thought I won't need to shop a lot and I'll just carry whatever I have at present because thats what I mostly use. However, towards the end I realized I should leave the old things behind and take new stuff with me (literally and figuratively!). This meant I needed to buy a good number of clothes to refurbish my wardrobe, shoes to replace my worn off ones, medicines to replace the ones on the verge of expiry... and the list goes on.
4. Getting the visa. While the formal process to apply for the visa and then go for the interview is pretty straightforward, its advisable to keep all bases covered. Therefore, before I could submit my application, I made sure I had tangible proofs of whatever I was gonna say during the interview - right from my high school marksheets to financial proofs showing how I proposed to cover the costs of the MBA. And since I claimed to get some portion of the funding from family savings, I had to nudge my dad to get his financial documents in order too!
5. Getting foreign exchange. If you're an international student, you'll have to carry US Dollars to cover your living expenses before your financial aid and fellowship kicks in. Credit cards work pretty well, but the downside of using them is the high conversion rates added to the final bill. There are some other options to offset these charges, such as wire transfer, traveller's cheques and travel/forex cards. Reading about all these, I found the travel cards to be the best and the most hassle-free. In India, you can get a travel card made from any major bank at a nominal one-time fee and at the US Dollar buying rate for that bank. Once you load this card with US Dollars, you can use it at any merchant in the US without incurring any additional charges. You can also withdraw cash from an ATM at a nominal fee for each withdrawal. They can be re-loaded on demand by anyone you authorize back home.
Ofcourse, there are a lot more things in the list and the whole of it won't fit in blogposts alone. For Indians, this is a very useful to-do list, that's reminded me of several things I'd forgotten about.
Phew! I'm almost done and I need to start packing. My next post will be from LA. Woohoo!!
~Ayushman Jain, MBA '14 (Twitter @ayushman_jain. Follow UCLA Anderson at @UCLA_MBA)
