What Does It Take for an International Student to Work in the US?

You definitely need more than a little luck

Before I came to California to start my Master study in July 2018, I was sure that getting a job after graduation was easy for me. After all, I already had 2 years’ work experience in China, how hard can it be, right?

Wait a second, why was I being so confident?

I graduated from a top 50 university in China, worked for one of the 4 biggest global accounting firms for 2 years. To me, getting good grades and a decent job was never a problem, and I would get a Master of Science degree pretty soon! With all these factors considered, I naively thought job hunting would just be smooth in the US too.

What brought me to California then? After working in my previous firm for 2 years, I got bored and decided to change my career focus from accounting to data analytics. I took some programming classes, applied for several Business Analytics master programs in the US and UK, and finally chose UCI as the starting point of my data journey.

I was a STEM field graduate, so I’ll only discuss situation for F-1 students who received STEM degrees here.

I made a tree to, hopefully, better illustrate the job hunting process international students (STEM major) are facing in the US.

Holding my student visa F-1, I came to California in 2018. As expected, I graduated in June 2019. 3…