7 hours of paperwork

I have been dragging my feet a bit on applying for permanent residency in Canada. There hasn't been much to motivate me to do it, as I have legal status in Canada on a work permit, things that require more permanent status Jeff is able to take care of for us (like opening a bank account or getting a mortgage) with my name tacked on, and there is nothing in my day-to-day life that is different because of my residency status. However, there is a particular grant that I am expected to apply for related to my research at work, and they require that you are at least working on getting permanent residency status in order to be eligible for the grant. The grant deadline is mid-March, so to be safe I thought I should start the process now.

Jeff and I spent somewhere around 7 dedicated hours filling out forms and gathering documents, and submitting phase one of my application. It was a mountain of paperwork, and I only hope that we didn't make too many errors. Jeff said, and I agree, that this paperwork is actually worse than the paperwork Jeff had to submit for his permanent residency in the US, because the instructions are worse. That is saying a lot, as anyone who has ever tried to complete a complex US government form can attest to. It would have taken much longer if I hadn't already done a lot of preparation, in terms of figuring out what documentation to collect – I actually worked on this a bit last August, and discovered that I needed a letter that could only be requested by the HR department at work, and that had to be issued by a particular government agency. The letter was requested in August, and I got it the 1st week of January. Now, I sit back and wait for a decision about phase one to be issued, which will probably take 2 to 3 months, and then I submit phase two, which will probably take a minimum of a year and a half in processing time. So check back with me in about 2 years, and maybe I'll be a Canadian permanent resident.

Work is very busy, but it is also exciting, as it is graduate admissions time. I have a number of applicants who have applied to work with me this year who appear to be excellent. Probably next week I will set up Skype interviews with the top 2 or 3, and hopefully soon be able to extend an offer. It is also honors student application time, and the process here is a bit different from other places – there is more of a match process, where students list their preferences for faculty advisors, and then advisors say who and how many students they are willing to supervise, and then qualified students are matched to supervisors. Since I haven't had my lab up and running for long, I don't have any current research assistants who are applying to honors this year, so this is an exciting process as well, where students that I don't know well will have listed me as a potential advisor, and then I get to decide who I'm willing to take a gamble on. In many ways, it is a little bit more like graduate admissions, and since there is some risk involved it is a little bit more exciting.

And now, really for the first time all weekend, I'm going to sit and relax. I'm going to make sure that next weekend is a little less hectic, and less full of paperwork!