I have a major problem with the ARC extension.
I have been enrolled at the CLD, NTU for a year studying Chinese, my last season (and at the same time visa) ends on the 21st of August. I have been already accepted at Tsinghua University but the registration doesn’t take place until September, so I have around 2-3 weeks where I am no longer an NTU student and also not yet an NTHU student and therefore have no ability to retain my ARC and stay in Taiwan.
I have been in contact with NTHU, NTU, Immigration and Mofa for a long time trying to solve this. I spent today the whole morning at the immigration and after a long internal discussion they still didn’t allow me to extend my visa. I was going through the whole process with a Taiwanese who has been acting on my behalf and fighting really hard to help me. Nonetheless we still didn’t get anywhere, even though the university also tried talking to the immigration and mofa as well as trying to find other ways to solve this.
My situation is different from a lot of other CLD students who go on to study at uni as I don’t have a scholarship so it’s not as straightforward for me as it is for those with the mofa scholarship.
I was basically told that I need to pay for another season in the language school even though I am not going to attend it (seeing as 3 weeks later I am starting university).
I wanted to ask you if anyone has ever run into such a problem or if anyone knows of a solution that wouldn’t require me to waste money on a new season at a lang. school that I am not going to attend (and I can only partially refund once it starts).
It’s even more frustrating considering how people with a visa-exempt status or visitor visa have no such issues and you just keep getting extensions for that (and most likely will get another one in August) while ARC holders are being screwed over and no such extension seems to be offered, even when you clearly have a valid reason to stay.
I welcome any suggestions and thoughts on the matter.
You can’t use your acceptance letter to change the purpose of your ARC from NTU to Tsinghua? Or extend it for the purpose of looking for a job? Students who just graduated can get a 6 month extension to look for a job. Then when you get your proof of enrollment you can just change it.
Edit: Oh I see , you were just a language student at NTU.
Have you talked with your embassy or representative office? You are not the first nor the last to do the language center and then school without scholarship. Try asking for help or advice on what to do there.
Yeah, acceptance letter is not sufficient for changing the purpose of the ARC. The rules are different when you want to do it in Taiwan compared to when you are doing it at your local Taiwanese representative office in your own country (which is the standard way to do it in the non-Covid season).
I am still considering finding a cheaper language school but at this point as I discussed with my uni switching language schools might generate a new set of problems as the ARC is always issued to a specific school which is also stated on the ARC itself. Also the requirement for getting this learning visa is that the program has to be a program with at least 15 hours of classes per week, so only certain intensive programs are considered sufficient for getting the visa while many evening programs don’t have enough hours for the visa requirements.
Yes, as I mentioned, I’ve been trying to solve this problem for a while so I went through all the usual channels and ways of solving it, such as talking to my university, the language school, mofa, immigration office, embassy and discussing that with students (both scholarship and non-scholarship ones). If anything, because of the research I’ve done and the pains I went through (read: a lot of wasted time) to make it work I was advising other people which routes not to follow than the other way around as the other non-scholarship students also didn’t find a solution for this and are planning on either paying for the next season or trying to circumvent it by first paying, getting an ARC and then refunding before the season starts (which, btw, is a dead end because the school regulations specifically state that they will inform the immigration about any change of student status which will in turn invalidate their visa.)
As I mentioned, I know of and have tried all of the usual ways, so if anything is going to work, then it will be something unusual or out of the box or based on some already established solution that someone has found by going through this themselves.
Actually, funnily enough, I am most likely (one of) the first one to go through this, because this situation is very unlike the usual process which would take place in a non-Covid season. The usual route is to leave the country and apply for the visa at the Taiwanese representative office, which is currently not possible as Taiwanese embassies only issue visas to mofa scholarship recipients (not to mention the fact that it would be just as expensive as booking another season and would also involve a 14 day qurantine).