All in all these hurtles of preparing for the internship weren't so bad. Things could have gone a lot worse. Potentially I could have had my visa application rejected or had to stay overnight to get the visa instead of same day processing in which case I would have missed several classes. I'm thankful this is the worst that happened.
First step in preparing for the internship was obtaining a letter from my school explaining that I was a student and had passing grades. Simple enough, right? As the answer to that question always goes, it was in fact not so simple. It started off with an email to my career services which didn't get a response. I then called both career services offices and neither had a clue. My next best guess was the dean's office of engineering. Upon arrival the entire office happened to be out for lunch so I sat around for an hour and waited. Finally getting a chance to talk to the secretary, I was told they could do nothing and said the registrar would be able to assist me. Well they couldn't do it for me either so it was back to the dean's office. With one last desperate begging attempt I managed to get a secretary to write me a short letter. Who knew simple tasks could require so much?
Next up was the waiting game. Another great welcome to the real world is paperwork. I was told the internship was mine and it took another two and a half months to procure a piece of paper telling me so, during that time I got to watch ticket prices increase by almost $200. That piece of paper then spent the next week traveling in DHL's hands from Shanghai so that I could go to New York City to get my visa. All was fine with that until DHL attempted delivery. The first day around 10am I was not home and a delivery attempt was made. This is understandable and I thank them for not just leaving the letter there. The next day, I planned on waiting until the letter came, heading to New York to stay with my sister and then arriving to the visa office the next morning as early as possible. This almost went smoothly except for the delivery driver never showed. I checked the delivery status webpage and to my surprise the driver had attempted delivery. I checked outside however and there was notice of a delivery attempt. I called DHL and figured out that the guy had just decided to drive by and not actually deliver the letter. I then waited another forty minutes and finally around 7:30pm he shows up.
