Ohio State's 'personal touch' for potential students: Calling them by the wrong name

Ohio State University wanted to reassure 17,000 accepted applicants that they won't be lost in the crowd at an institution with 50,000-plus undergraduates. The problem: The postcards they sent out all had wrong first and/or middle names for the prospective students. A "mail-merge error" caused the first-name and last-name fields in a database to become misaligned, said Dave Isaacs, spokesman for OSU's Office of Student Life.