It’s June 7 as I write this article, and I’m sitting in the DEN airport waiting to catch a flight back to MSP and on to ABR. Using airport abbreviations must mean that I travel far too much and am adopting their acronyms, as if I didn’t already have enough in my life.

I’m on my way home from presenting a session to the Loan Pros on the first full day of the RMASFAA Summer Institute. It is always a pleasure and a treat to be asked to present to groups at the RMASFAA SI (more acronyms). It was exciting to walk into the student center at Colorado School of Mines and greet (and hug) old friends, and to see the new faces that are sure to soon become the veteran RMASFAA members who organize this event in years to come.

If you will permit me to wax nostalgic for a moment, I think back to one of the first summer institutes RMASFAA staged back in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s. (Not sure of the exact date) The names of Bill Jones, Paul Tone, and Tom Monahan, come to mind as the presenters at the Surbeck Center at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, SD. My strongest memory of that session is that the Basic Grant Payment Schedule (now Pell) changed three times during that week.

Those were the seeds of a great RMASFAA tradition, and led to our association’s leadership in providing neophyte training, and subsequently adding other tracks as the needs for new training demanded. Training has become a core strength of RMASFAA through the dedication and commitment of scores, if not hundreds, of dedicated professionals since those early days.

It would be great fun to compare the programs of those early Institutes with those of today. Having a technology track wasn’t even on our radar screens back then, much less our full color computer monitors, PDAs or cell phone displays. The internet was more than fifteen years away from emerging as one of the most important tools at our disposal. Even though we curse the web from time to time, what would we do without it?

Enough of the look back. Can we discern lessons from the origins of RMASFAA SI to the present and apply them to the future? Of course we can.

Will the need for an educated populace change? Yes. Education will only become more critical for more people. Will there always be a need for someone other than students and their families to help pay the costs of postsecondary education? Yes. If the past is prologue, there’s always going to be a role for folks like us. Will what we do, and how we do it, change? Absolutely, without question, no doubt whatsoever.

That’s exactly where RMASFAA comes back into the picture. My fervent hope is that RMASFAA continues to affirm that one of its primary functions is training, and that RMSI continues as the cornerstone of that effort.

(P.S. I invite anyone who attended that first session, and has a memory better than mine, to e-mail me with your recollection of that first RMSI. If anyone has a copy of an agenda for that or any early Summer Institute, please send me a copy. A future Exchange article could compare training topics back then and what our topics are today. My e-mail address is clark.wold@eac-easci.org.)