F-1/J-1 Visa Question: How will you pay for this? / Who will sponsor you? - Former Visa Officer

As a former Visa Officer, I provide one-on-one personalized consultation. I review your back story, strategize for your next interview, and do mock interviews with you. Click this link to book a consultation: https://calendly.com/ben-arterburn/vi... I'm Ben Arterburn, and I was a U.S. visa officer, a consular officer. For many years, I did visa interviews, including F-1 and J-1 visa interviews. One of the key questions that we would ask almost every applicant would be: How will you pay for this, or who is your sponsor? We are not asking this just for you to give us a piece of data or a single name. We are asking this question in order to judge if your family has plenty of funding to support you. We are not checking to see if your answers correspond exactly with the numbers on your I-20. Instead, we are trying to identify if there is an excess of ample funding. Your goal when you answer this question at the visa interview should be to maximize the amount of funding and financial assets that you can show.