College is an excellent time to meet new people, find new friends and have an excellent time; however, it is rather short-lived. In just a few years you and all your new friends and acquaintances will go your separate ways – probably never to see each other again except during embarrassing college reunions a decade later. So, how to avoid this dismal fate? Fortunately, in 21st century there are numerous ways to do it – and we don’t mean Skype and mobile phones.
1. Group Chats
Things like WhatsApp and GroupMe allow you to create group chats that can run for as long as you like, giving you an opportunity to drop in and out when you feel like it, ask your long-distance friends how they are doing, share news about your lives and so on. By removing the extra effort needed to do all these things, it makes keeping in touch an easy and fun experience.
2. Create a Reason to Stay in Touch
Not forgetting your old buddies is a good intention, but the truth is, once you lose a consistent reason of maintaining contact with a person, it remains incredibly hard to make yourself do it, even if you immensely like him or her. While you were in college, numerous things kept you together: common acquaintances, common academic difficulties and problems, common hangouts, common hobbies and so on. So create a new reason to stay in touch – it may be something as simple as a monthly book or movie club.
3. Get Connected on Social Media
After all, it’s what they primarily are about – keeping in touch with people you don’t see every day. So, make sure to have all your friends on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or whatever else you are using – even if you don’t talk to them, you will be able to see how they are doing.
4. Veripost
When you graduate from a college you generally cannot expect it to provide you e-mail services anymore – which results in no end of confusion when all graduates start changing their e-mail addresses. On the way some valuable contact will inevitably lost – unless you use a free e-mail change service like Veripost, which makes the process easy and trouble-free.
5. Create Your Own Social Network
With the influx of new people in your life your old acquaintances are likely to get lost among never-ending updates from your new friends. So why not create a small social network just for old friends – with the help of an app like Path, for example?
6. Send Photos
Graphic images are very powerful triggers – they may create, maintain and resurrect good memories much better than words. So, no matter how far away you are from your friends – send them photos of yourself, showing how your life is going, and ask them to do the same.
7. Come Visiting
Of course, it is impossible to drop by every weekend if your friend lives in another country – but once in a while, why not? It will make the entire experience all the more memorable.
Staying in touch with somebody half a world away (or even as far as the next town) can be extremely hard – but nothing is impossible if you really set your mind to it.
