The Financial Aid Podcast Turns 4

13 April 2009 1 views 2 Comments

Actually, technically it was April 12, but today’s close enough. Yes, the Financial Aid Podcast started on April 12, 2005.

birthday cakes
Photo credit: Amanda Downing

A Brief History of the Financial Aid Podcast

On April 11, 2005, I got a new PowerBook G4 and an iPod mini. With a desire to put legal stuff on my new iPod, I started poking around the Interwebs and found podcasting as a nascent new medium, and I tuned in. I quickly discovered that podcasting was relatively easy to do, as evidenced by the number of people podcasting while under the influence of various substances that still had large audiences.

At the same time, we had an employee at the Student Loan Network who, to be charitable, needed to hear things more than once. Rather than repeat the same information over and over, I recorded a lot of our web site contents for them and stuck the recordings on their iPod. It didn’t help the employee improve, but the information was useful and sounded good enough to share with the public.

Thus, the Financial Aid Podcast was born.

On June 27, 2005, the world changed for podcasting. What was a niche medium that required a decent amount of technical savvy to even get started with became immediately accessible to anyone with an iPod when Apple created podcasting support in iTunes 4.9. Suddenly anyone with an iPod could easily tune in.

Four years later, the Financial Aid Podcast is still going strong, with tens of thousands of listeners and downloads a month, scholarship information, eBooks, and so much more.

To everyone who has subscribed for free and listened to the show, thank you. Thank you for your support, for tuning in, for giving up a few minutes a week of your valuable time. To everyone who has commented, contributed, and shared what they’ve experienced over the years in paying for college, thank you for generously spreading your knowledge to help your peers afford school.

What’s next for the Financial Aid Podcast? You tell me.

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