Have you ever heard of visiting scholars here at Northwestern? Do you know who they are? My guess is you don’t, because visiting scholars have a pretty unique status, and little to no visibility on campus. If your answer was yes, there’s a good chance you are a visiting scholar yourself, and you rushed to this column as soon you saw these two words appear in it, not quite used to seeing your status discussed in NU’s everyday conversations.

Visiting scholars are often unheard of, yet there are about 400 of them on campus right now, representing over 40 countries. Not exactly students nor permanent faculty members, they are usually at NU for research purposes (writing a thesis, working on a specific project with a department, etc.). They stay for a relatively short duration — from a few days to a year, though their appointments can be renewed.

Because visiting scholars have an in-between status, their situation is — to put it simply — that of a ghost. Of course, the name “visiting scholars” groups very different profiles — people who come for only a few months or who belong to a research team probably do not feel invisible at all or do not bother feeling so. But those who, like me, are students spending a year abroad to write a master’s thesis (“visiting predoctoral fellows,” as the official terminology goes) may lament the fact that they could go completely unnoticed on campus.

As a “non-student” person, I do not belong to any class (hence my difficulty to answer the basic question “What year are you?”), nor can I apply for on-campus housing or benefit from many resources on campus included in students’ tuition (I have to pay a faculty price to use campus gyms). To register for classes, I have to send an email to each professor asking them to agree to have me audit the course (without registering through CAESAR). Professors often have no idea what our status is and are pretty confused as to how they should organize our presence in the course, which is easily understandable since it’s likely no one ever told them who we were.

And then there is social life, probably the most difficult part of a visiting scholar’s integration into NU. Once again, we are not students, which means we are not invited to events. While freshmen are warmly welcomed each fall, visiting scholars sometimes have a hard time finding events around them to get to know people. We quickly learn to sign up for every listserv we hear of in order to be informed of what is going on on campus, because we don’t have anyone to come and tell us about it.

Don’t get me wrong: the visiting scholar appointment also comes with a wide range of advantages, like our freedom to take absolutely any class we want as long as the professor is OK with it. As someone who studies English at my home university, I could take an astrophysics or finance course (I will definitely not do that, but it’s nice to know that I could if I wanted to). Similarly, we are under no obligation to take exams — to be exact, we are not allowed to take exams. In other words, we are free to do whatever we want on this campus (academically speaking, of course), which I find very liberating. In short, the status in itself offers a great experience; but it doesn’t give enough orientation on how to navigate life on campus and meet new people.

Hopefully, if one day you happen to come across someone who tells you they’re a visiting scholar at NU, you will know exactly what that means, and you will understand both the joys and struggles of the status. At the very least, I hope you will spare that person the few seconds of hesitation they have when asked what year they are — trust me, they will be grateful.

Servane Duquénois is a visiting scholar completing a thesis in American Studies. She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.