For Margo Holen Dinneen \u201965, nothing should end up in a landfill if it can find a meaningful second home. That philosophy led her to bring Macalester mementos from her Prior Lake home to the College Archives\u2014photographs and documents that are now filling gaps in the college\u2019s understanding of student life and international travel opportunities from the 1960s and beyond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During the summer of 1964, Dinneen was one of the early participants in Macalester\u2019s Student Work Abroad Project (SWAP), traveling to Hong Kong to work at the local Hilton Hotel. While at Mac, Dinneen also participated in another international travel program, Ambassadors for Friendship, and later helped coordinate reunions for both programs in 1986 and 2010. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This past fall, her materials contributed to a research project in Professor Jess Pearson\u2019s history course, Time Travelers: Tourism in Global History, where students researched the beginnings of study away at Macalester. For Dinneen, donating these materials and working with current students has been an easy and meaningful way to give back to her alma mater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To me, history feels \u201cancient\u201d! Maybe current students do feel that our records from the mid-60s are \u201cancient!\u201d Through this experience, I\u2019ve learned that all current events do eventually become historical!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s actually unbelievable to me that the students could do their research from our old SWAP and Ambassadors paper records and AV items when there wasn\u2019t even equipment to access them on (e.g., slide projector, CD, or DVD player). Those students gave wonderful reports on what they had learned, and they also asked great questions of me!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Deep in my heart I feel like I\u2019ve always been kind of an archivist. Now, in my eighties, I knew I needed to pass things on. It was obvious that I couldn\u2019t keep all my wonderful treasures from Macalester, thus off to the archives. My entire motivation came from our philosophy that we don\u2019t want anything to go in a landfill if there can be another home for it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Innumerable opportunities to travel! Equally, friends whom I treasure deeply! In addition to events on campus, I am blessed to be in conversation weekly with eighteen 1965 classmates who live across the US, six others annually, and a few more occasionally. Thank you, Macalester College!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A participant in 1964’s Macalester\u2019s Student Work Abroad Project (SWAP), Dinneen’s materials are helping student research in 2026.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1357,"featured_media":31315,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,20],"tags":[46,657],"class_list":["post-31313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-study-abroad","tag-history","tag-study-away","mediatype-articles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"main_feature_story":"","custom_image":false,"custom_link_url":"","custom_feature_title":"","custom_feature_caption":"","custom_markup":"","custom_markup_link":"","custom_markup_title":"","custom_markup_caption":"","byline":"","article_type":[8],"post_thumbnail_style":"default","flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_downloads":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1357"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31313"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31723,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31313\/revisions\/31723"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}