I was a J-1 student first and later became a J-1 researcher. Do the same exempt-year rules keep running, or does the category change matter?
The part that confuses me is that I stayed inside J status the whole time, so at first I assumed the same tax rule just kept running. But the IRS material seems to distinguish between students and teachers or trainees quite sharply, which makes me think the category change may matter more than the letter on the visa itself.
Before I file the year, I want to understand whether the switch from student to researcher changes the exempt-individual analysis and how careful I need to be about tracking which years were used under which category.
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