Is excluding my middle name on a graduate application acceptable? I was born in Ukraine and when I immigrated to the United States at a young age my middle name was translated phonetically. In Eastern Slavic cultures, our middle names aren't quite the same as middle names in the United States. It's not simply an "alternative name" for me. Our middle names are patronymic. They are our father's names. I do not consider my middle name to be the same as the traditional middle name used in the United States.

I am currently applying to graduate programs and I have decided to leave my middle name out. The name is long and unpronounceable by most. On top of it being my father's name, it has a suffix ending "-evich" tacked on at the end. This makes it 11 characters long and it usually gets truncated to fewer characters when seen in my undergraduate university's system. This bothers me and I would just rather then not have the patronymic middle name in my records at all.

Are there specific reasons I should include my middle name on my graduate school applications?
Here is how I handle these things:


I publish papers with just my first and last name - no middle name or initial.
My vita and website use just my first and last name. 
When I fill out "official" forms, like employment paperwork and tax forms, I use the full name that is on my passport and driver's license.  This helps to avoid any confusion when these forms are compared with each other.  


For a school application, I would use the same name that is on your government ID. But this is just for the centralized records. Nobody in the academic department is likely to care (or even notice) if you just go by your first name and last name in public life.