How can you get an American visa, what’s required, what should we pay attention to before the visa interview — I’ll try to share the answers from my own visa application along with the problems and solutions I encountered. The first thing you need to do for an American visa should be to fill out the DS-160 form. The form asks for all your information. Your name, surname and many more questions will greet you. The questions on the form are in English, but if you hover your mouse over the texts you can see the Turkish for them. So don’t worry about not knowing English.
Then, as in the top image, you’ll choose where you want to apply. In Turkey there’s one American Consulate in Istanbul and one in Ankara. I made my application in Istanbul. Then you click the “Start An Application” button at the bottom. Then we answer all the questions asked. By the way, at the start they’ll give you a barcode number. Definitely note this number somewhere. Because the form is a bit long, and when there’s an issue with the internet connection the form can crash. So you don’t lose what you filled out, with this number you can click “Retrieve An Application” at the bottom and continue from where you left off using the barcode.
If you need help filling out the DS-160 form, I’d found a video on YouTube about how to fill it out. You can check the video at this link.
The only thing I can tell you about the DS-160 form: fill out everything completely and truthfully. That means education info, places you’ve worked before — even if you’ve done internships, add those to the places you’ve worked. It really makes an impact. And again I’m saying, write the truth. Finally it’ll ask you to upload a photo. You can upload a photo where your face shows, like a visa photo. You don’t have to use a visa-specific photo. When giving the visa, they’ll also ask for your visa photo.
After filling out the DS-160 form, it’s time for the payment and appointment-booking step. For this you need to make the appointment application from https://ais.usvisa-info.com/tr-tr/niv. On this page, by clicking the “1-Apply” button, we make our registration on the site. While registering, again they’ll ask for our information, passport number, DS-160 barcode number and similar information. Then you need to start an appointment application. In this step you’ll pay $160 — keep that in mind. That comes to around 470 lira according to the current dollar rate.
After making your application you wait for the appointment day and go to the consulate. My appointment was at 7:30. They start letting people in from the outer gate about 20 minutes earlier.
