Who are you?

It is commonly accepted that postdocs exist in a strange no-mans-land in academic life; we are neither faculty nor students, just researchers who don't fit well into the traditional boxes. While there are institutions and disciplines in which postdocs are so common that they have their own recognized identity, this is not my experience. At all. While most of my department faculty knows who I am, and some of the grad students can probably recognize me, I'm still an outsider both by virtue of language/nationality and academic position. I have been working here for over 4 months, and I still do not have a university email account and have not been added to the department email list. Important announcement? I better hope that my boss or my office mate, a PhD student, lets me know. I'm also still waiting to get a copier code.

Today, the department secretary stopped by my office to confirm the title of a seminar talk I will be giving next week. She then asked me for my school affiliation so that she could fill in her form. Perplexed, I stared at her. Did she want the name of where I got my PhD and did most of the research I would be covering in the talk? That didn't seem right. Turns out, she apparently didn't realize after 4+ months that I am actually employed here and not visiting from somewhere else. After she left, my office mate gave up on choking back his laughter.

This reminded me of a little snafu during my study abroad in northern Mexico back during my undergrad. It was during finals week, but one of my professors had decided to keep lecturing daily and planned to hold the exam sometime in the future (a little more flexible than US schools, no?). Once it became clear that he had no intention of holding his final before I needed to fly back to the US I scheduled a meeting with him to discuss alternate plans for my exam. When I asked him, he looked at me in complete bafflement and uttered those wonderful words, "Wait, you're enrolled in my class???" It wasn't that I skipped class or didn't take the midterm (he didn't bother with homework, so I can't really claim participation in that), just that he had assumed that I was sitting in on the class since my name had never appeared on his class list. Apparently, there were so few exchange students at the school (3 of us at a school of 30,000) that the university had decided it wasn't worth the effort to actually put us into the system for a semester. Fortunately, my classes all transferred back to my home university as pass/fail credits so my professors, who hadn't bothered to record my grades throughout the term, only had to decide if I had passed or failed. The professor who was still lecturing through finals week hadn't even written his final yet, so I never had to take it.

I'm thinking that I should get a little pushier about getting that new email address and being put on the listserv lest I end up another sort of ghost in the system. That, and listservs are great for scoring free food!