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Hi Suraj,

Thank you for your comment and we are sorry to her about your current situation.

Unfortunately there are several individuals who have been in similar situations to yourself. The issue that arises is that since you have been granted a permit to seek employment, there are different rules when it comes to your ability to apply for a new permit within Sweden.

An individual who has been granted a student permit can apply for a different permit type from within Sweden providing that they have completed at least 30 credits (högskolepoäng). However, once you switch to a permit to seek employment it is granted under a different legal paragraph. This means that in order to stay in Sweden you will need to meet different criteria. The Migration Agency assesses this on a case-by-case basis but from our experience you essentially need to have obtained employment and apply for a work permit in order to stay.

Since you are applying for PhD studies, which means you are applying for a doctoral student permit, the Migration Agency does not consider that you meet the requirements to stay in Sweden. The reason for this is that the Migration Agency does not consider PhD studies to be “work” in that sense as you are not applying for a work related permit.

While you may not be able to escape the requirement to leave Sweden we do want to say that the permit that you currently hold (permit to seek employment) does permit work and doesn’t have too many restrictions for what you are permitted to do in Sweden. From our experience individuals in similar situations have started their PhD positions on their job-seeker permit and then discussed with their employer and found a better time to leave. This, of course, relies on you having a few months of validity left on your current permit to plan for this.

While we are not able to provide any solution for your situation we hope that we have been able to provide some clarity.

Kind regards,
SwedishImmigration.se