Okay, so you’ve graduated college. Maybe grad school. Maybe medical school. And you’ve got your diplomas framed and hanging on your office wall. Or I’ve seen diplomas etched in metal on walls. Anyway, suppose you get married and you change your name to go with your spouses.
Can you get a new diploma with your new name on it?
Nope - Keep your maiden name for work.
I have a friend and a relative who both did this. One is an MD and is known as Dr XXX at work. Her husband is also a doctor at the same hospital and most people don’t know that they are married. The other is a solicitor who simply uses her maiden name at work. Both ladies use their husband’s name outside work.
The question was “can” not “should” or “do”. And the answer, at least for Yale, is yes. Here is the page describing their conditions for a reissue of a diploma:
http://secretary.yale.edu/services-resources/diplomas/duplicate-or-replacement-diploma
I’ve never heard of it, and I’m doubtful. Your earned your degree under a different name, and should anyone want to verify your attendence or graduation or some other details of your academic record, the changed name on the diploma won’t match up with any student records.
Well if you’d read my post just before yours, you’d see that Yale has a standard procedure for just this. I imagine other colleges do as well.
Student records are also mostly confidential. Without consent, the school cannot release much information beyond directory contact and dates attended. I’m not sure if a school would be allowed to inform you of a name change even if it was aware. Such information might illegally reveal a marriage or gender transition. I simply don’t know.
How about doing a little creative artwork yourself–or hiring it done?
In addition to what OldGuy provided I checked my university info and that of two state schools. In essence they all say this…
If you are requesting a name change on a replacement diploma you must provide a copy of:
• Marriage license or
• Legal documents with legal name change.
Plus $60.
How often are university diplomas used in a practical sense where having the names match up is important? I have done all sorts of things in life and have never been asked to show any of my physical diplomas. In fact, I’m not exactly sure where all of them are.
Transcripts are slightly different, but you can get usually get those on demand at any time during regular business hours of the university registrar’s office or whatever office handles them. Even then, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been asked to show a physical transcript (as opposed to agreeing to a background check that could include an investigation into my educational past or something like that or something).
I have an anecdote of some one – in fact, some two – who didn’t update their diplomas.
My father didn’t know how to spell his own last name until he was about 30 or so :dubious: – by which time, he was married and had one or two children (but not me). It turned out, whoever filled out his birth certificate had spelled the surname wrong, and he never knew it until then. So he, his wife (my mother) and two children had been using the original (correct) spelling all that time. My father and mother got their college diplomas using that original spelling. I’ve seen them hanging on the wall.
During WWII, my father tried to get a job at some war-related facility (Lockheed, I think) but his security clearance got all bolluxed up – nobody could find his birth certificate. It was finally discovered that the certificate existed with the name spelled differently than what he had always known. (The erroneous spelling is actually more common, as far as I can tell, than the original spelling; maybe that’s why the error happened in the first place.)
My father found that, with wartime security rules and what-all, it was going to be a major hassle to get a corrected birth certificate made. It would have been easier to simply adopt the name as spelled on the certificate, and notify everyone else of that – DMV, everyone else, etc. So that’s what he did. I guess that also entailed (somewhere along the line), getting new birth certificates for my two older brothers (one of whom told me once that he was upset at the time about his last name getting changed). But they apparently didn’t ever bother to get new diplomas made.
ETA: It also follows that my father and his immediate family and descendants, to this day, spell the name differently than relatives in other branches of the family.
I think this would only be relevant to professionals who hang their diplomas in the waiting room to impress the punters. You can see how they would prefer their diplomas to be in the same name as the name under which they now carry on business.
Heck, if I wanted to, I could get a new degree from my university, changing LL.B. to J.D.
The wife has all her diplomas, both Thai language and in English from the US, in her maiden name but uses her married name professionally. That’s never been a problem, but then she’s been in the same office for 30 years.
I know if you’re looking someone up at the U of Hawaii, the search engine will ask about maiden name during school. Maybe this is common at all schools?
It also plays into situations where there is a professional license involved. The person may need to submit both proof of education and the paper license in order to be employed, and if the two don’t match up, things can get complicated. Best to just get one’s name changed with the school and be done with it.