A school is a place where we make friends for a lifetime. The bonds forged while growing up, learning and playing in the school environments are long-lasting and invaluable. However, our career choices and professional compulsions take us in different directions after we finish school. The choice of our college and universities takes us to different corners of the world, away from our close school friends. These friendships forged in school are way too valuable to be allowed to erode purely because of physical distance. The technological evolution over the last decades has given us ample ways to keep in touch with school friends. Irrespective of which corner of the world we are in, which time zone we are in, which city, which country, or which continent we are in.
Let’s look at some of the prominent ways to keep in touch with school friends.
Occasional Visits
There is no better way to keep in touch with school friends than to visit them occasionally at their respective colleges or university. The ease of executing this would be contingent on how far you are located from your friends. However, it would be an interesting surprise and show of love towards your friend if you take the effort to visit them occasionally. If distances are prohibitive, maybe a rotating visit plan can be charted out.
Reunions and Get-togethers
Visits to individual friends might become tedious if your friends are spread out geographically. In such cases, you would want to meet them all together in one place. Reunions or get-togethers work very well in achieving these objectives. A reunion of a group of friends, or even your entire class can be organised at an exciting location which is convenient to most. Goa, for example, is one such popular location in India which sees a lot of get-togethers and school/college reunions being organised. Common location reunions have a few advantages:
– You can meet many of your friends in one place
– Reduces travel distance
– Reduces travel expense
– You can have fun with your friends at a fun location
Even if you have friends in the same city, you can pick certain popular eating joints, or picnic spots to organise periodic get-togethers to catch up with your school friends.
Celebrate Occasions
Celebrating special occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, festive occasions, New Year, etc. could also be one of the ways to keep in touch with school friends. These events and festive occasions and celebrations are always special in school. Continue this trend of making these occasions special by meeting up and celebrating together with your friends. A birthday celebration, or a new year celebration can be organised to bring all your friends back together.
Emails & Messages
Due to the busy college lifestyle and long distances, visits and re-unions may not happen as frequently as you may like to. In such scenarios, the occasional exchange of emails and WhatsApp messages could be a good way to stay in touch with high school friends. Drop an occasional “How are you?” email or message. Share new updates or news from your side. Ask your friends about the ongoing events in their lives. These could be healthy habits easy to execute to keep the friendship alive and fresh. A simple “Happy Birthday” or a “Happy New Year” could rekindle an old friendship which might have gotten dormant with the weight of other engagements.
Social Media Platforms
Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn offer us great opportunities to keep in touch with school friends irrespective of how far they are. You can search and connect with your friends on these platforms, share updates with them, and interact with them regularly. Most of these platforms offer some extremely fun ways of engaging with your friends. Share a meme with them, poke at them, share a joke, a funny video, etc. to keep the fun going in the relationship. Social media platforms also allow you to form your private group of friends wherein you can share old jokes, share updates and news and connect with your friends in a slightly more private space. Facebook and WhatsApp groups are highly prevalent where you can have all your friends in a common group. These group conversations are usually never-ending and extremely fun. These social media groups are a great way to stay in touch with school friends.
Common Interest Groups
General purpose groups sometimes lose traction as there may not be a common thread that drives engagement. In such scenarios, common interest groups having a smaller number of your friends could also be a good way to stay in touch with your friends. It could be a sports-based group, e.g. a few cricket fans can create a group on cricket. You can keep track of the performance of your favourite cricketers, and favourite teams, discuss their performance, predict match outcomes, and share bragging rights. Such common interest groups tend to be more engaging and a fun way to stay in touch with school friends.
Video Calls
Technology innovations have given us a plethora of free video chatting tools such as Google Meet, Zoom, Facetime, Whatsapp, etc. This is one of the easiest ways to connect live with your friends. You can do individual video calls or group video calls to connect live with your friends. All smartphones have these applications in-built hence it is easy to do no matter what time or place you are in. The evolution of the metaverse and augmented and virtual reality tools are making distant engagement almost life-like for us. These tools will soon allow us to engage with our friends from across the world as if we are an arm’s length away from them.
Also Read: 10 Tips for Reinforcing Good Manners in Students
School friendships are the most special of all friendships. These are the bonds which last us a lifetime. At EuroSchool we encourage and enable the building of these precious bonds in the protected environment of our campus. EuroSchool management, teachers and staff cherish these lifelong relationships our students build while at EuroSchool.
