Verbiage
I arrived in the US in 2007; I just became a citizen in 2024. The citizenship test/process is/was none too shabby. The process can be opaque though, and knowing what you are about to encounter is tricky if you don’t have a peer in front of you (in the process) who is good at relaying pertinent information.
I don’t normally consider myself to be particularly sticky or partial to short/medium/long term information retrieval. There are 100 questions/answer couplets which are easy enough to lock in your noodle. Once I had answered X correct questions, you are immediately passed or failed based on your performance.
After this, the person administering the citizenship test will ask you about your period of residence following the acquisition of your green card. The question was phrased in a very open ended/conversational fashion; I was relating my day to day interests and employment details via voice to a non-technical person. By the time this ~5 minute dialogue concluded, I realized that I was meant to sign something indicating the factual correctness of this broken telephone session.
At this point I started pointing out miscommunication/issues in the currently committed verbiage. Basically, there is no soft fuzzy social aspect to the interview, and what I had mistaken for a general friendly probing, was actually grounds for citizenship revocation should you happen to sign something factually incorrect. Since the interview is relatively high stress (or can be depending on your wiring and circumstances) it is easy to ramble or to give hand wavy answers. Don’t sign hand wavy answers with attestations of truth.
So, in hindsight:
“What have you done since getting your greencard”
“I have been perpetually gainfully employed; I ran my own consultancy company initially, before joining Foo company where I have been working for the lion’s share of the intervening years”
Succinct and I think it addresses the bowels of the question.
“We gave you a greencard; what have you done with that?”
My main takeaways from sitting this in San Francisco:
- none too shitty process
- relatively short waiting time
- take the same day oath swearing ceremony if you have the chance (and many people qualify; I believe/think it depends on the time of the citizenship test)
logistics
As part of becoming a citizen, you have to relinquish your greencard(s); this means that there is a window after relinquishing your greencard where you have no means to legally re-enter the US prior to getting a US passport. (I have no clue how entering on visa waiver would go; it probably isn’t smiled upon since you will be a renegade alien on paper).
I told the person administering my test that I would be traveling in less than a month, and hence deferred the oath swearing ceremony. My oath ceremony letter arrived none the less, and I had to miss the original ceremony. The second ceremony was (automatically? opaquely) scheduled 2 months later.
I tried to actually call the USCIS field office; you will listen to 4-5 minutes of mandatory refugee related information, then you will be fed to an automated menu system. This automated menu system will tell you it will disconnect you if you request an agent or attempt to skirt the grim text to voice diatribe. This is the bit which caused me undo stress, and ended up being for nothing.
Don’t rely on being able to speak to a real human who can help you (except maybe by way of snail mail) inside of USCIS. My second physical oath swearing ceremony invite never actually arrived at my place despite daily mail checks. Plenty of junk mail did, bills did, this critical document not so much. The letter in question was unregistered (no tracking number) so USPS could do nothing to help on this front. The phone number (remember) leads to madness.
There is a link provided to e-request a document should the original not arrive, but I assumed I had to use the original document (I dont believe this is the case at all). When I finally got around to going through the e-request flow they display, it turns out the oath ceremony letter is not one of the ones you can report as missing and request a replacement on. Nay, not at all. I can’t re-request N-445! You can’t re-request it as it was there in your USCIS portal since the day it was approved a month prior to the oath ceremony.
So really, my major takeaway was that USCIS in SF is pretty chill, my stress was undue; if your physical oath swearing ceremony form is lost in the mail, go grab it from the USCIS portal. No one is trying to bar you from entering the building, or attempting to undermine this process. The machine has warts, and due to the scale of the operation, you might have a slightly crumbier customer experience than usual.