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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.
- Read more...
Have you renewed your
WASFAA Membership for 2009-2010?
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