Andrea Jones pursued Portuguese dual citizenship and discovered it mirrors project management: researching documents, handling apostilles and notarization, networking for help, and eventually hiring lawyers. She argues that expertise, accountability, and a project manager (even part-time) make the difference.
Hi everyone, I'm Andrea Jones and I want to share a little story today about trying to get my Portuguese citizenship and how that parallels project management. My mom is Portuguese, as a lot of you might know, and I thought it would be a great idea to get my dual citizenship in Portugal, which you can do if your parent or grandparent is Portuguese. It was something I thought I would do on my own initially. I researched this and there was so much involved with the birth certificates and the marriage certificates and the application. Of course, it's in Portuguese, which my mom can read, but she wasn't super motivated to do it and help me. I finally decided the only way to get this done is if I were to hire a lawyer. So I Networked as much as I can. I was asking everybody, and you know I live in Florida now. There's a lot of immigration lawyers here. All of them are helping people come into the states and not necessarily helping them get citizenship somewhere else. I finally found a colleague through LinkedIn who lives in Portugal, but he's Brazilian, and I asked on LinkedIn if he knew of a great lawyer because he's living in Portugal, and he immediately introduced me to his legal team. So I engaged with them. I'm so excited, and we are working on getting my citizenship. Here's the parallel: I needed to know that someone was there that knew what they were doing and could help me. And I will say this morning I ran into a bit of a snafu. I had to get a certified copy of my birth certificate; has to be certified within the last six months by the time this thing goes through. Apparently, it has to be authorized apostille, which when I ordered it online, you know, and the lawyer had told me this apostille thing, I ordered it that way. But when it came to me, it didn't have that specific notarization on it. They told me, send a picture of it before you mail it to us so that we can tell you if it's the right thing, which I did. They told me it needed to have this Hague Convention 1961 apostille stamp and they showed me an image of what that looked like. And I researched again and found that I have to now send it back and get it stamped and all this stuff. But here's the next parallel to project management. They knew what they were doing and I didn't. And they told me to get it apostilled, but I didn't know what that meant. And then thankfully they were able to navigate through and I have paid them half the money upfront. And therefore I am going to do this. I am motivated to stay accountable. I figured it out this morning. I'm kind of proud of myself because it was Big pain, and now I've got this special apostille stamp certified birth certificate sending itself over to Portugal. If I didn't have someone there to help me, honestly, I will tell you it would not be getting done, and doing it myself was just off the table. So the parallels to having a project manager—it's just one nice to know you have somebody who's there. Somebody who knows what they're doing and somebody who's keeping you accountable that you're paying money to. And because you're paying them money, you don't want to not do it, uh, because otherwise it's a big old waste of your money. All right, I hope that's helpful to anybody on the fence about something you really think you need to get done. Figure out a way to do it, and maybe hiring a project manager, even if it's a part-time project manager— of course, that's what we do— might be a great way to do it. Thanks for watching.
