Well, the name change happened this Saturday. I am now officially a senior at Missouri State University and no longer a student at Southwest Missouri State University. Most of the changes are probably mealy cosmetic but it is nice to see that the university is finally repairing a lot of the facilities that they have been neglecting for quite some time. But the main objective of this name change is that the perceived image of the university will properly reflect its actual size. I know this is vague but bear with me I have some method to my random madness. 
The best example that I have been able to come up with is similar to the situation in Kansas.
The two main universities in that sate are Kansas State University and Kansas University aka The University of Kansas. These two schools are very well known and have fairly large student populations. Now, the two main universities in Missouri are Missouri State University and the University of Missouri. MU is larger than MSU true and they do get tons more of the state funding than does MSU. But both schools are fairly comparable in size (I do not have any statistical information right now so I am going on personal experiences as I have visited all four campuses several times in my life.) but SMSU did not have the public image, reputation, or what have you. Basically, whenever people hear the name Southwest Missouri State University (again, in my experience) I would hear comments like “which junior college is that again?” or “Is that a technical college or a junior college?”. This is a bit frustrating as SMSU/MSU is much larger than any technical or Junior college in this state and for some reason when people see or hear a directionality on a university name they have a stereotype that is attached.
I have attended my fair share of technical college courses and there is nothing wrong with attending a technical college and i am sure that there is nothing wrong with attending a junior college either I just have no experience with them. So, mainly the name change was a bout the image of the university and there is some more funding that may or may not come about if things go the way MSU would like, but who know.it has taken over 19 years to come about mainly due to the interference from MU as they tried to block every attempt to change SMSU to MSU so it is nice to “stick it” to our main rivals so victory is sweet I suppose.
The main thing that i have seen that are pretty awesome so far have been that we get a new shiny @missouristate.edu email/login ID and we get to customize the first bit so you can have something like vivecuervo@missouristate.edu instead of abc123s@missouristate.edu to list a really simple example that I am sure they will NOT allow us to do when they finally let us change email addresses, etc. We also get a rather significant increase in our email quota, the old limit was 10 MB. and now we get 300MB. I know that this i pretty laughable in these days of Gmail’s almost 3GB. of storage but for the students here this is HUGE! Finally, the website got a much needed face lift and it looks like it actually validates as XHTML 1.0 strict so maybe they finally dumped using those ugly Frontpage templates. It is faster, cleaner, and easier to navigate so i am in favor of that! I will let you know more later as I come across it..
The old SMSU site: (via Google’s lovely cache system)
The new, greatly improved, MSU site:
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