How to Write the Proposed Endeavor Statement for Your EB-2 NIW Petition

What the proposed endeavor statement is and where it fits in the petition

The proposed endeavor statement is the paragraph or short set of paragraphs that name, with precision, the specific work for which the national interest waiver is sought. It is usually written as part of, or attached to, the petitioner's personal statement (sometimes called the petition letter), which accompanies Form I-140 and the Form I-140 supplement covering the national interest waiver request. It is not a separate form and has no fixed template — it is a drafting task, not a checkbox.

Its function is narrow and specific: it gives the adjudicating officer one concrete statement of what the petitioner intends to do in the United States, stated clearly enough that each of the three prongs from Matter of Dhanasar — substantial merit and national importance, the petitioner's being well positioned to advance it, and the benefit of waiving the job offer and labor certification requirement — can be argued directly against it. Every other persuasive document in the packet points back to this statement rather than restating it independently.

It is not the whole personal statement, which may cover career history, motivation, and context, and it is not the recommendation letters, which corroborate the petitioner's qualifications and the field's assessment of the work from outside sources. Rather, it is the fixed reference point: the personal statement expands on it, the letters corroborate it, and the evidence exhibits document it. If those other documents drift from the endeavor as stated here, the petition reads as internally inconsistent.

Step 1: Name the endeavor in one precise sentence

Before drafting any surrounding narrative, write a single sentence that states exactly what the proposed endeavor is. Every other paragraph in the petition will expand on this sentence, so it has to carry the full weight of specificity on its own.

Build the sentence from three components

1. A verb that denotes concrete action — develop, deploy, validate, commercialize, implement, scale. Avoid passive or vague verbs like "work in" or "contribute to."
2. A specific technology, method, or field — name the actual process, product, or technical approach, not the general discipline.
3. A defined population or sector affected — the group, region, industry, or system the endeavor is meant to reach.

Compare a vague version against a precise one

• Vague: "I will work in renewable energy."
• Precise: "I will develop and validate a low-cost perovskite solar cell manufacturing process for deployment in off-grid rural electrification in Sub-Saharan Africa."

The vague version describes a field, not an endeavor — it gives the officer nothing to test the other Dhanasar prongs against. The precise version names a process, a method of validation, and a defined population, and it can be checked against exhibits: patents, pilot data, employer projects.

Keep the sentence fixed everywhere it appears

Once drafted, this sentence (or a near-verbatim variant) should recur unchanged in the personal statement, the petition letter, and every recommendation letter that references the endeavor. Divergent phrasing from document to document is one of the clearest signals of an inconsistent petition, so treat this sentence as fixed text, not something to rephrase for variety.

Step 2: Build the supporting paragraphs that establish scope and specificity

Once the endeavor sentence is fixed, write three to five paragraphs that expand it without changing it. Each supporting paragraph should do one of three jobs.

Paragraph type 1: field and gap

State the technical or professional field the endeavor sits in, then describe the specific problem or gap it addresses. Name the gap concretely — a failure rate, an unmet population, a technical limitation — rather than describing the field in general terms.

Paragraph type 2: specific activities

Describe what the petitioner will actually do: experiments to run, a product to build, patients to treat, a policy to draft. Tie each activity to the verb used in the endeavor sentence so the reader sees the same project, not a broader job description.

Paragraph type 3: mechanism of scale

Explain how the endeavor's effects reach the scale claimed for it — through publication, licensing, deployment in a named market, patient volume, or adoption by a policy body. This paragraph is what connects a project-level description to a scale-level claim.

Cite inline, not generally

Every factual claim in these paragraphs should point to a specific, named item: a grant number, a named employer project, a specific patent application number, a dataset. Write

Step 3: Draft the national importance paragraph

The national importance paragraph has to tie the endeavor sentence to a documented concern — something a third party published, not something the petitioner asserts. An officer reading a claim like "this work is critically important" with no source attached has no way to evaluate it. A claim backed by a named document does.

Pick a source type, then a specific source

Usable source types include:

• A federal strategy or policy document (a named agency report, an executive order, an agency strategic plan)
• Published industry data (a market analysis, a trade association report)
• Peer-reviewed literature establishing a field-wide gap or shortage
• Government statistics (an agency's published workforce or production data)

Worked example

Vague: "Renewable energy is important to the United States."

Sourced: "The U.S. Department of Energy's published solar manufacturing roadmap identifies domestic perovskite cell production as a named priority for reducing import dependence in grid and off-grid solar deployment."

The second version names the issuing agency and the type of document, and connects it directly to the endeavor sentence already drafted — it does not describe the petitioner at all.

Verify before citing

Do not quote a report from memory. Before the paragraph goes into the petition:

1. Locate the current version of the document on the issuing agency's own site.
2. Confirm the statistic or statement still appears in the current edition.
3. Cite the document by its actual title and publication date, and attach it as an exhibit.

A citation to a superseded report or a misremembered figure is a specificity problem an officer can check in minutes.

Step 4: Draft the well-positioned paragraph

This paragraph answers a narrow question: why is this petitioner, specifically, positioned to carry out the endeavor named earlier? It is not a second CV. Every item included must causally connect to that endeavor sentence — if a credential or project doesn't make the endeavor more achievable, leave it out, even if it is otherwise impressive.

What to include

Select from these categories, keeping only the items that bear directly on the stated endeavor:

1. Degrees and training — but only the ones that built the specific technical capability the endeavor requires, not a full academic history.
2. Specific past projects — named projects, grants, or employer initiatives that demonstrate prior work on the same problem, cited to an exhibit (a grant number, a project report, a patent application).
3. Track record of progress — publications, patents, pilot results, or deployments that show movement toward the endeavor's stated scale.
4. Existing relationships — named collaborators, institutions, or letters of support already in the exhibit list, described by what they will contribute.
5. A realistic plan with named next steps — concrete, dated or sequenced activities (a pending trial, a planned licensing agreement, a specific funding application) rather than a general statement of intent.

How to write it

Draft each sentence to answer "how does this fact make the named endeavor more achievable," not "what has this person accomplished generally." Cut anything that would read the same in a petition for a different endeavor.

Step 5: Draft the benefit-of-waiver paragraph

The third Dhanasar prong asks why the United States benefits from waiving the job offer and labor certification process for this petitioner, for this endeavor. This paragraph fails most often by drifting into a general claim that labor certification is burdensome for the petitioner's occupation as a whole. That is not the question. The question is what, specifically, about the named endeavor makes the standard process a poor fit.

What the paragraph must argue

Tie the argument to one or more of the following, and connect each directly to the endeavor sentence:

• Timing — the endeavor is already underway, tied to a funding cycle, research window, or product milestone that the months typically required to secure a job offer and complete labor certification would disrupt.
• Specialized or cross-institutional nature — the endeavor requires work that does not map onto a single employer's defined position, or spans institutions, collaborators, or sectors in a way a single labor certification cannot capture.
• Impracticality of a single sponsoring employer — the petitioner's work product (a technology, a published method, a clinical protocol) benefits users or institutions beyond any one employer, so tying the petition to one employer's job offer would not reflect how the endeavor actually operates.

Drafting check

After drafting, read the paragraph and ask whether the word "endeavor" could be replaced with the name of any other project in the same field without changing the sentence. If so, rewrite it using the specific milestone, collaborator, or timeline named earlier in the petition.

Checklist: consistency and specificity review before filing

Run this check against the finished draft before it goes into the petition packet.

After the table

Make the corrections, then repeat the pass once more on the revised draft before moving to the final paragraphs of the petition.

Common drafting mistakes that trigger a Request for Evidence

A handful of recurring errors account for most RFEs tied to the proposed endeavor statement.

The endeavor is stated too broadly

Phrases like "advancing artificial intelligence" or "improving public health" describe a field, not an endeavor. An officer cannot test a field against the Dhanasar prongs. If the sentence from the naming step could describe the work of thousands of people, it needs narrowing.

The endeavor shifts between documents

If the personal statement says the petitioner will "develop diagnostic algorithms for rural clinics" and a recommendation letter says they "advance machine learning in healthcare," the two are not describing the same endeavor on paper, even if they are in the petitioner's head. Reconcile the wording before filing, not after an RFE asks which one is accurate.

National importance argued from the resume

Listing the petitioner's publications, awards, or job titles does not establish that the endeavor matters at a national or field-wide level. That argument belongs in the well-positioned paragraph. The national importance paragraph needs field-level evidence — a report, a statistic, a strategy document — independent of the petitioner's own record.

The benefit-of-waiver paragraph is missing or generic

A sentence asserting that labor certification is "impractical" without tying it to the specific endeavor's timing, structure, or lack of a single logical employer reads as boilerplate.

Before filing, read the full petition in document order as an officer would, checking the endeavor sentence each time it reappears.