January 15^th, at midnight I finally hit the button “Submit” and filed my N-400 on USCIS’ website. If you’re not familiar with this jargon, they are chances that you’re not trying to go through the lengthy and tedious process of naturalization. If you are about to embark on this journey yourself, or are curious about the process thousands of people in the United States are going through every year you have come to the right place!

Becoming a United States Citizen feels so unreal, and super exciting at the same time! It has been 10 years since I have been living in this incredible country and a bit less than 10 years since I have been in New York City, the most amazing city in the world! I know it sounds like I am romanticizing it but I actually went through every possible phase while living in this city and I feel quite objective about it now. I will dare to say that New York City has a grip on you or it’s just not for you at all. You just have to check Quora and read the gazillion questions and answers on the topic….including this one. This love and hate relationship, how you hate the noise, the dirt, the stress yet can’t imagine being away from this crazy place for more than 3 weeks without missing so many things about it, especially my go to food places!

Now that the application is under review, the next step will be to go to my biometrics appointment. Once I receive my notice with the scannable QR Code I will just run into the place and get it over it. The waiting list is crazy long, so I will do anything in my capacity to reduce the wait. People who never had to apply for any kind of immigration application might not be familiar with the process, but with people traveling as commonly as they do nowadays, it’s very likely that you had to at least apply for some VISA to travel abroad. I found that the greatest cause of delay in submitting an application is to do it without preparation and without submitting everything as requested by the recipient. Sounds like common sense to you, but I bet the majority of people rush into an application without submitting it all at once, or without carefully reviewing it because it’s so easy to do it online which gives it a feeling of “room for errors”, because we’re accustomed to that “edit” button.

This post marks the beginning of my naturalization journey, hopefully someone going through a similar situation might find it useful to read.

Other topics I will cover here:

• Multilingualism
• Bilingualism
• Being an Immigrate in the United States
• World Travel
• Lifestyles (Living in Europe, Living in the U.S)
• Dual Citizenship
• Triple-Citizenship
• Working in the U.S
• Working in Europe