Notes from President Mindy Bergeron's recent Presidential Highlight for January 2010

• Happy New Year! I hope you all had a chance to spend some time with your families and loved ones during the Holidays. This seems to be the time of year that you stop and realize just how crazy your life has been the past year. And now we're already on to another year with lots of expected and unexpected changes coming our way. Hopefully, we are all acclimated back into the unpredictability of our financial aid lives. You can never say that our careers are boring. Every day and every student is different.
• One of the WASFAA President's duties includes attending each of the eight state conferences in the WASFAA region. This is hardly a duty. To date, I have had the pleasure of attending the ALASFAA conference in Fairbanks, Alaska; the NAFAA conference in Lake Tahoe, NV; WFAA in Seattle, WA; AASFAA in Mesa (Phoenix), AZ and CASFAA in San Jose, CA. I still have two conferences to attend which include OASFAA in Portland, OR and PacFAA in Honolulu, HI. The only state not having a conference this year is Idaho. The annual WASFAA conference is being held this year in Idaho on April 16 to 18, 2010 so we hope some of our Idaho colleagues can join us there. The one thing I found in common with these conferences is that they had an increase in attendance over last year. For instance, in Alaska they had two more attendees than in 2008 for a total of 52. Coming from California I learned that even with 52 conference attendees you can have a successful conference. All the conferences I attended had the same concerns and had a variety of interest sessions and guest speakers. Even Marianna Deeken, one of our favorite federal trainers, made it up to Fairbanks. And to the other extreme California had a successful conference with 766 attendees at the San Jose Convention Center. I also had the opportunity to attend the SWASFAA regional conference in Albuquerque, NM in December. With cuts to their entertainment budget the SWASFAA gang had a couple of "family game nights." They found an empty meeting room and played board games such as "Apples to Apples" well into the evening hours.
• The WASFAA Executive Council had their quarterly meeting in Summerlin, NV, which is outside of Las Vegas, on November 19 and 20, 2009. Leonard Walker, our Site Selection Chair Extraordinaire, found us the bargain room rate of $55/night and a low-cost all-you-can eat buffet. The rooms were actually really nice, too.
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