An Indian-origin Microsoft techie, Aishani B, shared her story of becoming a permanent resident in the US after trying for an H-1B visa for years. In a LinkedIn post, Aishani shared how she kept trying for the work visa every year between 2019 and 2025 and she did not get picked in the lottery a single time.
Sharing her feeling of repeated rejections, Aishani said the first rejection was hard, while the second came with rational thoughts but then onwards, there is nothing new to say. Meanwhile, she moved from US to Canada in 2022 and came back to the US in 2023 on an L1 visa.
"People ask me what that feels like. Honestly? The first rejection stings. The second, you rationalize. By the third, fourth, fifth — you stop telling people. Not because you’re ashamed. But because there’s nothing new to say. What nobody tells you about losing repeatedly: It’s not one moment of disappointment. It’s a slow, quiet erosion of certainty," she wrote.
"Am I good enough to be here? Would someone else have figured this out by now? How long do I keep trying?" she added
Come 2025, she got Green Card through EB1, which is meant for individuals with extraordinary ability. Aishani said she never thought she would qualify for this, especially after seven rejections but she did.
"Because the version of me losing lottery after lottery didn’t feel extraordinary. She felt exhausted.
What kept her going? A quiet belief that there was a reason for this. And a stubbornness that refused to find out what quitting felt like. 7 losses didn’t mean no. They meant: not this way. If you’re counting your own rejections right now —the number isn’t the story. What you build in between is," Aishani wrote.
The techie often shares titbits about immigration on her LinkedIn. In an earlier post, she spoke how immigrants are always in between. In India, they are the one who left; in the US, they are the immigrant engineer and in Canada, they are starting over again, she wrote.
