As some of you know, I changed my name when I got married. Deb wrote a great post yesterday about the thoughts she went through with her decision which are pretty much exactly the same as mine.

However, since my degrees are in my maiden name, I wasned to change my middle name to my maiden name. What I didn't realize, though, was that when I applied for my marriage license, I could only change the last name, not the middle name. And what I also didn't realize was that to change the middle name, there is this long process of going to court to get a judge to approve you changing the middle name, as well as running a announcement of the change in a newspaper for 60 days, before its official.

I'm not sure I would have made a different decision about changing my name had I known all that before. Probably not, but it would have been nice to know what a hassle it is.

And will I ever get around to changing the middle name? Maybe. I started to try and do it before I came out to SF, but I ran out of time. I thought about just using my maiden name as my middle name unoffically, but when I become a Professional Engineer, my legal name will be on my stamp. And I would like it to be the same as the name I use professionally.

Now becoming a PE, that's a whole other thing - I am currently in the process of trying to remember all the projects I worked on in my career, including the amount of time I worked on them and what engineering skills I used. All this just to qualify to take an 8-hr exam!

Don't you just love buraucracy?

Posted by dahl at September 20, 2005 10:56 PM

May have mentioned this before, but our approach was for my wife to keep her last name (and I of course keep mine). And when we have children, we tentatively plan to give girls her name and boys my name. Although we'll probably only have one kid, and not anytime soon.