Preferred Name

Cleveland State University has adopted a policy to, where possible, use the name that a student prefers to use other than their legal name. The Office of Disability Services is committed to implementing this policy and recognizes the importance to students to be acknowledged as who they are. Because of the work involved in propagating this information throughout our information systems the initial roll out of this will be limited. The office of Disability Services uses an information system that gives options for listing a preferred name but until we are able to include this information in CSU's larger information infrastructure we will only be able to use the preferred name field in limited situations.

We will include a preferred name in the Faculty Notification Letters submitted to professors from Disability Services. This will appear at the top of the letter where the full name is presented there will be the preferred name in parentheses. For example if Jane's legal name is Jonathon Doe it would appear where the whole name is used as Jonathon (Jane) Doe. There are other places where the first name Jonathon would be referenced. We cannot use the preferred name in these areas yet.

Students can enter their preferred name and select their preferred pronoun when filling out the Disability Services Online Application when registering with our office. Students are also able at any time to change the preferred name in our information system by logging in and updating their profile. The directions for this are below. If a student would like to update their preferred pronoun or gender they will need to contact their Disability Specialist. The preferred pronoun field in our system is only used for office reference and does not affect correspondence sent by our information system. At this time it is not possible to update a professor's information in our system without it being updated in PeopleSoft.

To Add or Change a Preferred Name

1. Go to the AIM Student Portal
   1. Read and electronically Sign any eForm agreements if you have any that appear
2. Click on My Profile near the top of the page
3. Scroll down to the Preferred Name edit field and enter a new name
4. Click the Update Your Profile button

Note: This form gives fields for updating contact information as well. Any contact information updated in this form will be replaced with information in the nightly sync with PeopleSoft. If you need to update contact information or your address please go to CampusNet.