Most foreign citizens need visa on arrival to study in Belarus. We found out from Svetlana Pronkul, Leading Specialist of the Customer Support Department of the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics where to start with paperwork, when students aren’t allowed to enter the country and whether you can apply with a tourist visa.
– Svetlana, what does an applicant need to get student visa?
– The basis for issuing student visa is an invitation from the university for education. Applicants send scanned copies of passport, education documents and their translations to the admisson board. If everything meets our requirements and the applicant's grades are good, the admission board members decide to invite the foreigner. Our employee prepares the invitation. Usually it takes 7 days to approve it by the Citizenship and Migration Department. After we send the document to the applicant.
– Are there any other terms for getting invitation apart from good grades?
– Having secondary education is obligatory. You can enter a university only after graduating from a school or college. Accordingly, you can enter a master's program after getting a bachelor's degree and a post-graduate program only with a master's degree. In other universities there were cases when young people who had an education corresponding to the basic one in the Republic of Belarus were allowed to enter a bachelor's degree. But this is prohibited: you can only enter colleges with it. This condition applies to all foreign applicants.
Another term is financial solvency. We need to understand that the student will be able to pay tuition and living expenses in Belarus.
– Where can an applicant get visa?
– There are two variants: it can be issued at the embassy of the Republic of Belarus in your home country or at the National airport "Minsk" upon arrival, if there is no diplomatic mission of the Republic of Belarus in the country. In the second case, it is important to collect the required set of documents in advance and have it with you upon arrival in the country.
IMPORTANT: If the applicant lives in a country where there is an official diplomatic/consular representation of the Republic of Belarus - the visa can be obtained only there.
– Is the student visa often refused? What difficulties may happen?
– Everything depends on the student himself and his integrity. We and our partner company fulfill all requirements clearly and without complaints. If there is an invitation and all documents are filled in correctly you’ll get visa without problems.
But there are nuances: for students who obtain a visa at the embassy in their home country, everything usually goes clearly and without any problems. But when a student obtains a visa at the airport in Minsk, an unexpected situation may occur. Sometimes people come with fake passports, forged educational documents. When they send us scans of documents, we cannot check their authenticity. At the airport, we see the applicant for the first time, and if he or she shows strange documents or has forgotten something, we have the right to write a refusal and not take responsibility for this person.
– Were such cases in your practice?
– Yes, there was a case when when we issued an invitation to a Congolese national, but he did not inform us and came with fake French passport. We even didn't know that he had already arrived to Belarus.
Sometimes people arrive without any documents or money at all. It is clear that the aim of the person is not education. Then we send him back.
It is obligatory to coordinate the date of your flight with a representative of the partner company, as upon arrival in Belarus the applicant must be met by a representative of the university he/she is applying to.
– Can a person study with a tourist visa?
– No, you need a student visa to study. Many people come to Belarus with a tourist visa to look around. When they realize that they like everything, they come to us and say: "You know, I don't want to go back home and then come back here”. But we can’t help. With a tourist visa foreigners aren’t registered by the Department of Citizenship and Migration which is necessary if they come to study here. So you have to return to your home country, apply to us for an invitation, open a student visa and after that come to Belarus for entering a university.
– People from what countries can come to Belarus to study without visa?
– It is possible to come to study in Belarus without a visa from countries with a long visa-free regime — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine. But candidates for studies must still apply to us. They also need an invitation to study, only in a different form. It describes the documents required for admission, study and living conditions. This letter is the basis for leaving the country.
– Do students more often go by themselves or by the companies?
– In general we work with companies as well as other universities do. We get a lot of personal enquiries, but we don't consider them, we advise our intermediaries. If the applicant doesn’t agree, we turn them down. We used to work directly with applicants, but we won't do that again.
It is difficult for a university employee to supervise everything: you have to collect the documents, register the student, supervise him in the dormitory. The intermediary companies take on some of these responsibilities.
