Korean Job Discussion Forums

[jasonXkeller]

Sooooo. I learned an expensive lesson today. It goes like this:

My wife and I took our CBC's to a friend to have them notarized. This is done because the Calif. Dept of State will not Apostille a federal document, but they will validate a California Notary Public. Being responsible, we each ordered two copies of our CBC. One to use and one as a backup. Here is where we went wrong. Our notarial friend used a Jurat type notary(a statement that we are who we say we are and we presented these documents and so on). This is exactly as it should be, except...she used only 1 Jurat statement for both CBCs and stapled them all together. I was a little concerned about this but she was doing us a favor. Now the Jurat statement says "2" pages. Anyway, we took it to be Apostilled. No problem, except that having them notarized together renders our spare CBC useless, unless we pull them all apart, get new Jurat statements for all four CBC's and four new Apostilles. A cost of about $140.

Mind you, the CBC's we have apostilled now are fine and can be used, but our hard to come by backup CBC's are no good unless we go back and do all of the apostille again.

Perhaps someone can help. If I am applying while in the states, can I hand deliver my documents to the Korean embassy or will I mail the docs to my school? It's my understanding that you receive your visa before you leave, but I'm not sure. We try to cover all of our bases, but sometimes we miss things.

Ooh. Another helpful note if you're in CA. The Dept of State used to apostille documents issued by the state(i.e. your diploma) without a notary, but they don't do this anymore. Save yourself some time and have the copies of your diploma notarized before you go to the state dept for your apostille.