For the most part, the paperwork wasn't too awful. As foreigners going to teach English, we had to apply for an E2 visa. The E2 visa allows us to work (as English teachers only) and stay in South Korea for our contract period. I have to say, Casey was the most organized through this process. With his lists and amazing excel files (yep, even Gnatt charts ;) I felt like it went smooth. So sit back, relax (try to stay awake), and enjoy the ever so exciting journey through our Korean paperwork process. We Said "I Do" After verbally accepting our positions with our school, we had to get started on all our paperwork. Most people have all their paperwork ready before even starting the interview process. The first thing we had to do was get an FBI background check. In order to get any teaching job in Korea you MUST get an FBI background check and it MUST be apostilled through the Washington DC secretary's office, not your local state secretary's office. You have two ways in which you can go about getting a background check.
Get It Together We ended up using a company called National Background Check, Incorporated to get our FBI background checks. Their company made the whole processes pretty easy. We had to print out and complete their information packet and get two sets of fingerprints done. We got our fingerprints done at our local police station who provided us with the fingerprint cards and it cost $7 per card. The fingerprint cards MUST be signed by the officer who took your fingerprints, so before you leave the station make sure their signature is on the card. The Waiting Game Now we had the FBI background check applications and fingerprints in hand! The processing cost per application was $50.00. The channeling service gave us several options to pay for the shipping of the results. There is a minimum $5.00 regular US Mail fee to get the results. You can pay to get it expedited but we chose snail mail. We ended up going paying for the application fee ($50.00) + standard mail ($5.00) + extra copy ($20.00) = $75.00. We didn’t know if we would need an extra copy of our background check in Korea. So we ended up getting another copy in case there was a requirement for a background check for substitute teaching at different schools. We sent off our packets and waiting very impatiently for our FBI background check to get returned! Appa - What? Before getting a job in South Korea, I had never heard the word apostille. Awhile ago the United States and South Korea became members of the Hague Apostle Convention. If a country is a member of the Hague Apostle Convention the government can ask for a document to be apostilled (in other words, you get a really expensive, shinny stamp on a document and the stamp authenticates the notary or the document itself). We had to get two pieces of documents apostilled: 1) photocopy of our college degree and 2) original FBI background checks. This whole apostille process can be kind of confusing. Different US state agencies can apostille different things. So since the FBI background check comes from a federal agency this document can only be apostilled by the US Department of State in Washington D.C. Our degrees had to be aposilled by a state department since they are considered state documents (any stat can apostile any degree- if you got your degree in Nevada, you can get it apostilled in Washington state). At first we thought we would just be able to drive down to our state capital and get the FBI background checks and degrees apostilled all at once, but NOPE. We had to repackage our FBI background checks up and ship it off to DC to get apostilled by the US Department of State. Pack It Up, Ship It Out We had two options on how to get this FBI background check apostilled.
The Drive to Olympia....Twice Onto the next document! Now we had to get our degrees apostilled. The first thing we had to do was get certified copies of our degrees notarized. We called ahead and made sure the UPS store could notarize a copy of our degrees. We had read in a few places that we would have to get our degrees notarized and apostilled from the same state they were issued. We did not run into this issue at all. The UPS store said they could make certified copies of our degrees and they could notarize them as well. I think we could have probably made our own copies of our degrees, but we would have definitely needed the originals anyway for the notary to compare. We left the UPS store thinking we had notarized copies of our degrees! We were so excited that we didn’t check that the guy who notarized them actually signed them. Opps! Off we went to Olympia, WA, to go get our degrees apostilled (we could have done this by mail, but we needed it quickly). We showed up with just our “notarized” documents and were just so excited! The lady at the Washington Secretary of State Office took one look at the “notarized” documents and said “I am sorry, but these notarized documents aren't signed, I can’t apostille them.” SIGH. We didn’t bring the originals and we had just driven 1.5 hours to Olympia. We had no other choice but to go home, get the originals, drive back and try it again. So that is exactly what we did. We ended up getting the degrees notarized (again and correctly) at a place up the street from the Washington Secretary of State. We returned to the WA SOS and everything was ok! After paying our $15 per document, we walked out with our degrees apostilled. We got both our Masters and Bachelors degrees apostilled but I think we could have just gotten our Masters degrees apostilled and that would have been fine. So after a full day of driving, we finally had everything apostilled! Don't Smile for the Camera and Show Your Ears One of the last few things we needed were passport photos! We went down to a drugstore that did them in our area and ordered 20 photos each. Passport photos are needed for everything! We had to send six photos to our Director in Korea, the Korean Embassy needed two, and we also ended up getting an international driving permit, which required one photo as well. We just ended up ordering a bunch because we heard it was harder to get them done abroad and we kept needing more. One of the requirements for the passport photos was we had to show our ears, (super random, but super common) but hey, we have good looking ears and didn't mind showing them off. The Visa We received the visa application from our school’s director in an email. The application required a lot of repetitive information, and it took about an hour and a half to fill out. One thing we learned quickly, all paperwork in Asia (and I think most of the world other than America) uses size A4 paper instead of the standard 8X10 measurement we are used to. We had originally printed our visa application on the typical 8X10 paper and realized it looked really really odd. We sent everything (apostilled FBI background checks, apostilled degrees, passport photos, and our visa applications) to our director. He received and reviewed everything and said everything looked great. Here is where he did his magic! I’m sure he had to fill out other paperwork and he then sent everything off to the South Korean government who processed everything. What came out of all our paperwork was an email our director forwarded us with an official number of some sort that we were to take to the Korean Embassy. To The Embassy!
About 3-4 weeks later our director emailed us and told us all our paperwork went through and was accepted. He forwarded us the email he had received with our acknowledgment numbers and told us to take the email down to the Korean Embassy. Casey called up the embassy who directed us to their website and told us we had to fill out more paperwork! After printing and filling out the documents needed for our visas (on A4 paper of course) we went down to the embassy to drop off our paperwork, our two passport photos, and the email that our director sent us. They took everything from us and instructed us to call back 3 business days later to make sure everything was ready. Three days later we had our visas and were ready to go! Now...onto the packing!
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