Giving

In town early for football practices, Roger Roe ’70 first met his future wife, Paula Speltz Roe ’73, outside Burling Library during Paula’s freshman orientation week at Grinnell.

During the 1960s, Grinnell’s Program for Practical Political Education (PPPE) flourished, sponsoring elaborate mock political conventions in Darby Gym and bringing to campus a long list of luminaries, including former Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.

Guillermo Mendoza served as a pre-med adviser to hundreds of future physicians during his distinguished 34-year teaching career at Grinnell College.

In many ways, outdoor learning at Grinnell College was already synonymous with celebrated biology professor Kenneth A. Christiansen.
“Anything and everything was of interest to him, particularly his research outdoors,” says Anne Spence ’66, a former College Trustee and student of Christiansen’s.

Everyone has a memory from Grinnell College where they couldn’t stop laughing, says Daniel Malarkey ’08.

Emily Ricker ’18 knew she could “get away with speaking English” during her 2016 summer internship in Pohnpei, an island in the Federated States of Micronesia.

Imagine the vast quantity of data an online retailer such as Amazon collects from shoppers in a day. Or the amount of data the New York City Police Department collects on “stop and frisks” in a year.

Lucy Chechik ’18, a chemistry major from Minneapolis, wanted to study abroad and chose DIS (Danish Institute for Study Abroad) Copenhagen because of its focus on medicine. 

Austin Simmons ’90 routinely describes Grinnell as a winning lottery ticket. “It was pure luck that I ended up there,” he says. “Grinnell was everything I needed.”