Well, I understand this is not necessarily always the case. In fact when I lost my student pass 9 years ago, it took me hell a lot of trouble to get a replacement from Immigration and Checkpoints Authority of Singapore (ICA).

But still, I must give thumbs up for the surprisingly easy procedure I went through this morning.

My Student’s Pass (SP) is expiring on 31 Dec 07, and my study is only going to end in June 08. So I would have to renew my SP, but only within one month before the expiry date, as requested by school.

Due to my procastination habit, some unnecessary procedures with school admin and their delay, I only managed to sent application for renewal on 24 Dec. It takes at least 10 days for ICA to process, which means my current student pass will not last long enough before the new one get approved. According to school, I will need to surrender my SP before it’s expired, and get myself a temporary Social Visit Pass (SVP).

So, I went back and checked about SVP. There’s a lot of info on ICA’s website regarding SVP, total of 10 categories, process time for different categories, collection time base on the queue number people get, etc. But I still couldn’t figure out which category do I belong or how long does it take to get approved. So I head down to ICA this morning with my Passport and SP.

As expected there’s a crowd on every level, ICA is never lack of visitors, and thank to the daily crowds, a small market is already forming on the stretch of road from Lavender MRT Station to ICA Building, nonofficially.

I came to Level 4, which handles visitor applications. There’s a queue at the enquiry counter, not too long. When I told the officer my situation, she asked me to take a Q number from a machine nearby and go directly to Counter 24.

Number 2168, and there’s one person in the queue. What, only one person before me?

I went to the counter, number jumped to 2167, no one showed up, it’s my turn! Handed over my SP to the lady officer, she gave me two forms to fill up. No questions, no photos, no waiting, she immediatly stamped a SVP on my Passport, valid for 3 months from today.

I couldn’t believe it’s done, I even asked her whether I need to come back or what, she said nope, that’s all.

It took a total of, say 10 minutes? Including the time I spent filling up the forms. With this kind of efficiency, I really wouldn’t mind to visit ICA now and then. Well, only if I need to.

By the way, I heard PR Application is much more complicated and some people happened to go down 2 or 3 times before their PR got approved. Hope it wouldn’t happen to me next year.