What happens to your passport while the visa is processed

This question comes up because of what it stops you doing. With the passport at the mission you cannot fly anywhere, sit an exam that requires it as identity, or start another country's application. Whether that is your situation depends entirely on which of two systems your destination uses.

Two models, and who uses which

The distinction is explained more fully in national type D visa versus Schengen type C and, for what happens after landing, the residence permit card after arriving.

If the passport is retained

You surrender it at submission and get a receipt. That receipt, not the passport, is your reference for the whole waiting period. Three consequences worth planning around:

You cannot travel internationally. Book nothing. This includes a trip home to another district that requires air travel with photo identity — carry the national ID card instead — and it certainly includes any journey abroad.

Getting it back early is possible but not free of cost. Most missions will consider a written request to return the passport in an emergency, such as a death in the family or urgent medical travel. What that does to the application varies: some missions hold the file, some require you to resubmit the passport before a decision, and some treat the request as a withdrawal. Ask in writing, get the answer in writing, and do not assume the friendly answer.

A delay is not a lost passport. Files sit with missions for weeks and sometimes months, and the tracking wording is deliberately neutral. What each status means, and how to collect at the end, is in tracking and collecting your passport. If the wait becomes unreasonable, what to do when your visa is delayed.

If the passport is not retained

For Finland, Sweden and Denmark the immigration authority decides first, and the mission's role is to take your identity data. You bring the passport to that appointment and take it home the same day. The permit arrives as a plastic card, sometimes posted, sometimes collected. You can travel while the decision is pending — but do not schedule travel across the identity appointment, because rebooking it can cost weeks.

Validity, blank pages, and renewal

• Validity. Missions expect the passport to remain valid comfortably beyond your intended stay, and a passport with only months left will generally produce a short visa rather than a full one. Check the mission's own requirement before you submit.
• Blank pages. Keep at least two clean pages. A full passport is a genuine refusal reason at the counter.
• The ten-year rule. For Schengen purposes, a passport issued more than ten years ago is not accepted, even if it still shows validity.
• Renewing mid-application is the messy case, because a visa or permit cannot be moved from the old book to the new one. Read renewing your passport mid-application and getting a Bangladeshi e-passport as a student before you start either process, and if your passport has under a year left, renew first and apply afterwards.

Can you hold a second passport for the meantime?

This is asked constantly and the answer is no in the ordinary case. Bangladesh issues one passport per person, and applying for another while one is valid is not a workaround — it is a discrepancy that will surface. If you genuinely need travel documents during the waiting period for an unavoidable reason, the honest options are to ask the mission for the temporary return of the passport, in writing, or to delay the application until after the travel. Neither is convenient. Both are better than a second document you cannot explain.

What to do with the waiting time

The weeks the passport is away are the weeks most people waste, and they are the best preparation window you will get. In that time you can: line up accommodation shortlists for your arrival city, price health insurance, read your university's registration procedure, start the language basics, arrange how tuition will actually be remitted through the student file route, and prepare the arrival tasks in pre-departure and your first week. None of it needs the physical passport, and all of it is otherwise done in a panic in the fortnight before the flight.

If your passport is lost or damaged during the process

Report it, get the police report, and tell the mission immediately. Do not wait, and do not apply for a replacement without telling them: a visa issued against a passport number that has since been cancelled is not usable, and an undisclosed replacement looks like something worse than carelessness.

The one thing to do before submitting

Photograph or scan every page of the passport, including the blank ones, and store it with your file copy. You will need the number, the issue date and the expiry date repeatedly over the following weeks, and every one of those weeks is a week when the book itself is in someone else's building. The rest of the file discipline is in assembling the physical visa file.