diego's blog

Moving to USA

I am moving to the USA for a postdoc at Yale (🥳). Since this is not the first time that I move to a new country, I already have a mental checklist of things that need to be taken care of:

Sometimes, that naive list turns out to be more difficult than what it seems: opening a bank account requires to have a permanent address, and renting requires to have a bank account (catch-22 anyone?).

In any case, phone-numbers are the easiest, but the most annoying of the three and the one I like to get out of the way as fast as possible.

Taking an Uber from the airport, using G-maps to find the hotel or calling possible accomodation options to visit all require to have a local number (or pay heafty fees in roaming). Furthermore, since it is not always possible to find a SIM card in the airport, that means that the ordeal to get a phone number compounds with that of arriving, not a great thing (my experience trying to get a phone number when I arrived in Paris was awful).

Back to the USA, something that surprised me is how expensive data plans are! Used to the European market, I was disappointed when I could not find any reasonable plan for less than 50$ a month.

I was about to give into getting one of these expensive plans when I found Mint Mobile. Not only was the cheapsest option by far (20$ versus 50 $), but it allowed me to get an e-sim instead of a physical sim.

This got me thinking, will I be able to set it up before even landing in the US? That would be amazing because it meant that I would not have to survive a single second without data in my new home. Not having used an e-sim before I was a bit unsure about how the whole thing would turn out.

I went online, bought a 3-month plan, selected the e-sim shipping option and I got a QR code. I scanned it, download the app in my phone (it did not require my phone's store to be in the US 😮‍💨), and before I knew it, I had my data plan set-up.

As of writing this, I am about to take my plan, so I have not tested if this works or not, but if it does, it is game changing!

Update after landing: It worked like a charm. Do recommend to anyone moving for a month or more to the US.