How to Stay in Touch with Roommates/Floormates Over Summer
One of the most difficult parts of finishing up a school year is leaving the roommates and floormates with which you’ve developed such close friendships over the year. After all of the long nights spent laughing, studying, supporting each other and enjoying each other’s close company, it seems completely impossible to imagine leaving these people who’ve become not only your best friends, but your family.
It’s understandable that not all of your friends or floormates will be able to travel across-state to see you in person (if they can, that’s fantastic!). The good news is, there are many ways to survive the summer without them right next door, and before you know it, you’ll be moving back onto campus again!
Write Handwritten Letters
Take an old-fashioned twist on communication this summer by writing your roommates or floormates handwritten letters! Everyone loves getting mail, and your roommates will love it even more to see an envelope in the mailbox addressed to them by one of their close friends who lives far away.
You can put anything you want in the envelope–you can even mail your friend a cool-looking leaf you found outside one day! Writing and sending letters is a concrete way to communicate and personalize your messages to one another in a way that surpasses what a text message is capable of saying.
Schedule a Regular Phone Call Day
If you know there’s a certain time during which you and your floormates or friends are free each week, block it off so you can talk on the phone in a set time frame. You will feel much more connected to your friends, and you’ll have peace of mind that you can count on talking to your friends and check in to see how they’re doing at a regular time. You can even expand phone conversations to include more than just 2 people using a conference call function on your phone. A set time for group phone calls will be something you look forward to each week to catch up until you move back to college.
Skype or Facetime
If phone calls just aren’t doing the trick, a more visual way to stay connected with your buddies is through video chatting on Skype or FaceTime.
It’s the closest thing to being in the same room with your friends, and some video chatting services allow you to add more than one other person to a video chatting session, so you may be able to hold a 3 or 4-way video chatting session.
Play multiplayer games
An indirect but fun way to stay connected to your roommates and floormates is to play smartphone games on multiplayer mode. This allows you to play against each other continuously, no matter where you’re living.
A notification that says “Anna has completed their turn” or “Bella has moved up on the leaderboard!” reminds you that they’re interacting with you and allows you to be in ongoing communication through a fun avenue.
Group Texting
Did you find a cat meme you know your roommates would love? Send it to your friends in a group text to share the hilariousness! Create a texting thread that involves your closest friends from college to keep an ongoing conversation alive all throughout the summer break.
Group texts are great because you can have a conversation between all of your friends together, and no one will miss a message, photo, or link to a funny video you send them. Group texts make it easy to update everyone about your life and check to see how your roommates’ summers are going, all in one place. The deluge of notifications will be worth it. Promise.
Social Media
There are a number of ways you can use social media to stay in the loop with your college roommates and/or floormates. Create a Facebook group for your college floormates, or tag them in articles you find on Facebook or Instagram. Mentioning a friend in a comment associated with a piece of media they’d likely enjoy is a wonderful way to let your friends know you’re thinking of them.
Or, if you’re inclined to Snapchat, send your friends small snippets of your day in photos or videos under 10 seconds long! This is a super informal and fun way to share your day with friends no matter where you are, and show others cool places in town wherever you happen to be on a given summer day.
Watch TV Together
Do you and your roommates/floormates have a TV show you can’t live without? If it airs in the summertime, watch it together (virtually) by staying on the phone while you watch the show in your respective locations, and gush about it during commercial breaks. Popular shows like “Orange is the New Black,” “America’s Got Talent,” and “American Horror Story” are great for this!
Alas, none of these tips can exactly recreate the chance to be in the presence of your college floormates or roommates who you’ve made your family over the year, and it’s going to feel like time is passing slowly when your best friends live across the state from you in the summer. But every day that passes is another day closer to moving back into the dorms or an apartment with your best friends, and that thought should keep you going throughout the summer.