I have gone to two. The first was great. I had a lot of fun. The second wasn’t bad but was less organized and not as good.
I was just notified that planning has started for my 50 year reunion in 2025. I have no plans on going so the email was deleted.
high school ones are. I’ve never heard of a college reunion though.
I’ve seen people say there is no need for reunions due to facebook where people can keep track of each other. I can’t say if that is true since I am not on facebook.
I hear about them more in the FaceBook era. It used to be that we only heard about our own, and if the organizers didn’t know your current address, you might miss one. But now, I hear about every (well, nearly every) class’s reunion on the both the group for my high school and the group for current and former residents of my home town. I just attended our 40 year reunion last fall.*
*Nitpick: Not 40th. Even if we had one every other year we’d still all be nearly 100 years old before the 40th came along.
For us old people; yeah. Not huge but a big deal. My wife’s school has gone to having a reunion every two years but including all classes/years since the school closed in the early 80s – and with classes of say 60-80 before that there just aren’t enough people to do one for each group.
Among the younger set ------- it looks like the first one of any note is 10 years and then basically every 5 or 10 after that is what is being planned. How many come off I don’t know; none of the kinfolk are much for that type of thing.
I know that Yale and MIT both have class reunions every year with most emphasis on those divisible by 5. In fact the Yale MBA program has class reunions so it extends to at least some graduate schools.
That’s more like an alumni weekend. People from an anniversary divisible by five are more likely to show up.
I think my high school has done reunions, but I’ve ignored them utterly. I’ve contented myself with watching Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion twice, considering the time much better spent. I could subject myself to the cretins who I’d gotten away from as fast as possible, or have fun with Romy and Michele. No contest!
Before Facebook (and maybe still) there was some website that organized class reunions, and which somehow got my email and was constantly sending me messages, until I think I finally just told them to stop because I hadn’t the slightest interest. I couldn’t figure out if there was a breathing person behind it, or if it was all just automated.
There was a company aptly called The Reunion Committee. They were fucking relentless in leaving voicemails on my landline for my 10 and 20 year reunion. They put on the whole thing and charged for tickets and for pictures and whatever to make a profit. Google says they they are still around but Facebook must have taken a huge bite out of their business.
What makes it an Alumni Weekend rather than a reunion. I was contacted specifically to tell me it was our 30th and 40th reunion – probably earlier ones as well but I don’t recall.
A reunion is specific to the graduating class; an event just for them. The other is a thing were everyone who ever graduated from any year can go but since some people travel from far away they make a special emphasis for some of them. They contacted you a told you whatever to get you to go there and donate to them.
My old high school (the school my actual school was merged into) only does all-alumni events. It leaves it to people from each class to organize their own reunions, but it will make mailing lists available to them. AFAICT all the graduating classes have settled on holding reunions at 5-year intervals.
I went to my 5th, haven’t had any interest since. Last I knew they had combined our class with the classes before and after for reunions.
I was referring to MIT in post 11, and it is a reunion not an alumni weekend, because it is centered around classes, and only 5 year anniversary classes are invited.
Plus it is called a reunion.
MIT, not having a football team does not have Homecoming events like Illinois, for instance. (Homecoming Weekend was when you stayed off the roads since the alums liked to drink.)
Princeton has reunions, but everyone comes. That was when the stores in Palmer Square used to make their money.
Where I went to college they are held the same weekend as the annual homecoming. There will be 5, 10, 20, 25,30, 40, 50, 60, and 70 years class reunions all on the same weekend. The different classes will met in different locations on Friday night. Then Saturday the classes will met at the Academy grounds fir a day filled with different events. The afternoon will normally include a trip on the TS Golden Bear from the Academy in Vallejo out to the SF bay. The ship will drop anchor and we will watch the Blue Angles fly for SF Fleet week. I Will be there in 2020.
My college has an alumni/ae weekend every June, with reunion classes every 5 years. I’ve been to all of my 5-year reunions and several others to see my friends from other classes. My high school had them for awhile, and I went to a few. Then they seem to have ceded control to Classmates.com, at which point I could never figure out where there was supposed to be a reunion.
My 29 year old daughter’s high school class had a reunion last year, and my 8th grade class had a 40 year reunion in 2017. You don’t see them advertised in newspapers on on the radio-. How you found out depended - you might find out through an alumni newsletter if your school was organizing, or through an email or even a mailed flyer if your classmates were organizing it. Facebook has definitely not eliminated reunions - it’s actually made them easier to organize than it was before. I was part of organizing a reunion before Facebook - a bunch of us had connected on Classmates.com and were using that platform to organize the reunion. It meant that some of us paid for memberships so that we could send and receive messages to and from other members, and we mailed flyers to the last address we had for those we couldn’t find on Classmates. The one my grade school class did in 2017 - thirty or forty of us were already in contact on Facebook. (we had not been in contact all along- we re-connected on Facebook) and we found almost all the rest of our classmates without resorting to using old addresses from 40 years ago. Some of us had kept in touch with classmates who were not on Facebook , we found some classmates on Facebook who were not part of our Facebook group, we found some classmates’s parents and siblings on Facebook and asked them to have our classmate get in touch. I think we ended up trying to find addresses/phone numbers for about 10 people total.
Heh heh. Weekend nights at the tavern in our small exurban town was a de-facto 5th year reunion.
I was talking about reunions with some people recently and the multi-class reunion seemed to be a very popular idea: it seems my experience of of being friends with others in school in grades above and below me, rather than “my” class was not uncommon.