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vii Foreword Two hundred fifty—that is the number of guest rooms we told Chicago’s Drake hotel we would need each night during Broadening opportunities, Encouraging Diversity, the July 2011 sixth biennial national Association of fellowships Advisors (nAfA) national conference. In the year leading up to the conference, the planners at times worried whether we had overcommitted and would be able to fulfill our contract with the Drake. We particularly worried that the economy and university budget constraints would keep people from attending. After all, these are lean times in academia , and perhaps that year would be the one nAfA members tell us that though they really, really wanted to attend, darn it, they just couldn’t find the money. our worrying was for naught. We watched our room count quickly tick up and pass the 250 mark six weeks before the conference started. Before we knew it, we were contracting for more rooms at the Drake, asking if nearby hotels could handle our overflow, and sending ever-moreharried reminders to the nAfA listserv that if members had not booked a room yet, they might want to take care of that right now. We ended up with 336 registered conference goers, a one-third increase from our seattle conference just two years prior. That level of growth would be remarkable for any organization, let alone for one during poor economic times. so what is going on here? My instincts say that our growth is primarily fueled by the remarkable attitude and good nature of our members. nAfA conferences just feel different. In general, I do not consider myself to be a conference guy. I do not like being away from my family, on someone else’s schedule, paying money for events that are sometimes of dubious quality. But ever since I attended my first nAfA event, I have been hooked. nAfAns are generous, almost to a fault. We share information and best practices even though we are all engaged in zero-sum competitions. It would be easy for all of us to take our ball viii • Foreword and go home, but we choose to share, to collaborate, to celebrate student victories even when they are not ours. of special note are our foundation and overseas partners, who patiently answer all of our questions, down to the most minute, obsessive details (should that be stapled or paperclipped ? is not too fine a question for a nAfAn). I also think that people attend and loyally return to nAfA events because they find a plethora of high-quality advice. The nature of our membership means that our speakers tend to be well-educated people who are deeply thoughtful about their work and how to present it to others. The 2011 conference also included two exceptional people who helped us focus on our conference theme. John Brown Jr., the associate director of the White house Initiative on historically Black Colleges, spoke about the intersection of higher education, diversity, and scholarship advising. During our closing banquet, keynote speaker Debbie Bial, founder of the Posse foundation and recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” gave a charged and provocative speech questioning our very concept of merit and how we measure it in our society. These speeches—along with the thirty-nine concurrent sessions, the thirteen foundation presentations, the new Advisor’s workshop, the half-day symposium on higher education in Ireland, the breakfast and dessert roundtable discussions, and our regular guided conversation about ethics in scholarship advising—made for a busy (some might say exhausting), rewarding, and completely full conference schedule. With all of that activity, not to mention our summer study travels and off-year summer workshops, it would be easy for nAfA to rest on its laurels or just keep the same formula. But nAfAns, like the students we advise, are full of ideas and work hard to realize them. Thanks to nAfA’s past presidents Paula Warrick and Jane Morris, we are in the middle of enacting a five-year strategic plan to make the organization even more meaningful and important to its members. In the coming years, we can look forward to an improved website, further outreach to institutions that serve traditionally underrepresented constituencies, and an annual survey of the profession. We are also encouraging nAfAns to connect to other scholarship advisors in their region, offering funds for smaller gatherings that might attract new institutions to join us, or to offer postconference information and highlights to schools that could not join us...

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