Next Steps After Accepting Your Offer
Shortly after accepting your offer, Disney will send you a few emails regarding your next steps. First you have to pay your program fee on the DORMS website. The DORMS site is also where you will register for housing and program courses if you are interested. The program fee was $154.50 USD, which with our exchange rate at the time became $205.23 CAD.
Next I received an email on May 15th from Disney saying that I would need to submit a police check to a third-party agency once they contact me. I figured that I would receive this email from Yummy Jobs shortly after so I went and got my police check that week. You only have to get a basic police check (no vulnerable sector screening). At my local police station (St. Catharines) the basic police check costs $45 CAD and I was able to get my results the same day. After talking to some other people who are beginning their program around the same time as me, I expected to receive this email at the beginning of June so when I didn’t, I became very anxious and impatient. I finally received an email from Yummy Jobs on June 27th requesting my police check, which is just a little over two months before my arrival date. I felt like this was really cutting it close because it was my understanding that we had to submit our police check 60 days before our arrival date! But I was so so relieved and happy to receive this email because it made everything feel very real!
Once you submit your police check you will be able to get your visa approval, and I received mine by email on July 5th. You need to print you visa approval form and then from there the process for Canadians is fairly simple. Canadians with a Q-1 visa do not need to go to the embassy prior to departing to the United States and instead are granted visa status when they enter the country. Having my visa approval basically gave me the green light to go!
In between submitting my police check and receiving my visa, Disney sent out a few other emails. One email reminded us that we have to let Disney know our travel plans and we also have to upload our medical insurance documents (more on this later). Another email was about “The Disney Look” and included a document that outlined all of their dress and appearance requirements while being employed for Disney. Disney has some strict appearance guidelines (such as no visible tattoos, only natural hair colours and styles, only neutral nail polish colours but no nail polish if you are working in F&B, etc), most of which are no issue for me. If you are interested in checking out the full “Look Book” you can find it here: http://ip.disneycareers.com/en/onboarding/non-edu/working-here/disney-look/
After that, most of the next steps are very reliant on you – you have to purchase travel insurance, decide what you are doing with your cell phone, notify your bank that you are leaving, make travel arrangements, pack, etc, etc! I will be writing about each of these topics in following blog posts because I found these are topics that are not discussed so often and Disney doesn’t help you at all with these things!
