It’s hard to live without friends. The pain and tedium that’s life would be unbearable without their love and support. Losing touch with a college friend is excruciating because they might have helped you define yourself as a person in this busy, often hectic period of your life.
Friends know you better than everyone, short of family. They are there to share your successes and support you when you fall. If you had someone like that in your life but lost touch with them, it’s understandable that you regret it.
Few things can be more exciting than reconnecting with an old friend from college online. A combination of social media, people finders, and specialized services can help you find people online in no time. Here are the best options in more detail.
People Finders
You can use websites known as people finders to track down an old college friend. Type any details you can remember about them in the search bar. As a bare minimum, you need their name and state, which could be your college’s state.
The people finder might retrieve your friend’s current phone number, email, address, and other current information. You can try to get in touch with them once you have their contact details but exercise caution.
Introduce yourself when you call if you got the number from the site. It might not be accurate, or you’ll make the recipient of the call feel uncomfortable. Data from people finders aren’t always correct, and a different person might pick up or answer that email address.
Social Media
Facebook was originally created to help people reconnect. Look for your alumni network and view all the member profiles. If a lot of time has passed since college, your friend might have become unrecognizable.
You can also find old college buddies on Grad Finder and Alumni Online. Their databases are far more limited, though.
LinkedIn is worth checking out because users list previous and current colleges on their profiles. You’ll link to classmates via the college automatically. LinkedIn offers far more options than most alumni networks. Besides searching by college, you can also look by job, name, or location.
You can add users to your LinkedIn network, send other members emails, or edit your profile to reach more people. The more contacts you have on the network, the more likely you are to get to your friend.
Reunion
You can look for old college classmates, former coworkers, and even lost relatives on Reunion, an alumni network with around 30 million members. You can create and read blogs, make a profile and view other profiles, check out newsfeeds, post and view pictures, and search for other members at no cost. However, you need to pay to send users messages and get their details.
Final Thoughts
Your reconnection will only be as meaningful as your relationship was back in the day. It’s important not to confuse nostalgia for days gone by with genuine feelings for a person. It’s normal to keep fond memories of college, particularly if your life has changed significantly since then.
You’ll find you quickly run out of things to say if your friendship only involved partying or cramming for exams, which isn’t meant to discourage you from contacting your old friend. Expect a gradual, not an immediate return to the connection you once had.
They will be happy to reunite if you used to be very close. Significant life changes tend to follow people’s college years. Your friend might have had children, founded a company, or be busy with something else. Be prepared for this too. What’s more, your interests and priorities have changed since then. They might be just as surprised about who you’ve become as you are about how they’ve changed.
