Late last year I was accepted into a low-residency MFA program in Fiction--a great program that is housed in a small-ish Southern University, and I begin my first classes today. The program uses BlackBoard to manage correspondence and daily activity (student-student and student-professor), and meets around the country for intensive residency workshops twice a year.
Logging into BlackBoard for the first time, I realized a few things in quick succession. In my head, it looked sort of like this: name change process not finalized, used on all of my application and admission materials, of course registered that way on Blackboard-awkward, okay-will be finalized before the end of this year, small program (only 13 people were accepted), this is my only contact with these people until the first residency-double awkward-so I'm going to have to make a switch on people part-way through a semester if I don't get this changed now, confuse everyone, and likely have to answer some questions that aren't really pertinent to our course of study.
Ugh.
Anyway, I emailed my prgram advisor and just said that I was in the process of legally "amending" some "incongruous" identification documents (yeah, I can be a little vague, I suppose) and that I hadn't mentioned it in our prior correspondence, as it didn't seem relevant to the topics-at-hand, and did she mind if I went ahead and switched the name on BlackBoard in order to avoid confusion amongst my classmates when the time came. (I'm a paragon of empathy, right?) She replied back, "Go ahead, no one's going to care what name you use." Great!
Except stinking BlackBoard kept giving me an error message every time I tried. Nothing's ever just that simple, I know. So I email the IT people and get back, basically, "are you sure you are who you think you are? All of the records match, and there's no record of the person that you want your name changed to." Yeah, I'm pretty sure. So I apologize for not giving enough information originally, explain that I'm in the process of the name change, give the whole "confusion" spiel, and try again.
"Sorry," I get back. "I can't change your name unless it matches the Registrar's office, because you'll confuse the heck out of everyone and etc. etc. etc. Contact them."
But I don't really want to contact them, and I'm pretty sure that I know how that will go anyway, and I really should be, you know, doing some course-work instead of getting caught up in bureaucracy today, right? Maybe. So, after a little more back and forth, in a last-ditch effort, I forward the email from my program advisor (giving me the okay), and profusely thank this person again for all of their assistance.
And it worked! "Okay," (I can hear the sigh in the email) I get back from her this time. "I'll go ahead and change the name in BlackBoard, but you still need to contact the registrar's office about the name change so that all of your records match." Well, yeah, I mean, unless I want to spend the next three years of my life working towards a degree that will eventually be conferred upon "someone else..."
Anyway, so that's it. It's small, but it feels great, and I thought I'd post here to give myself something to do while I obsessively log in and out of BlackBoard waiting for the change to take effect. Also to let everyone know that it is possible, with a little persistence, even at a small school with no gender-(anti)discrimination policy (in a state with a very trans*-unfriendly track record) to get little things like this done, to make things just a bit more comfortable.
-Jake
