Class Reunion Planning: Reunion Committee

It's tradition that the senior class officers bear the responsibility of planning class reunions when the time comes. For me, that time came a few years ago.

While the class president would normally spearhead the class reunion planning efforts, ours was living in Michigan. The class reunion needed to be held in Texas, where we graduated, so it would have been extremely difficult for him to handle the class reunion planning.

That’s where I came in. I had been the senior class vice president, I still lived in Texas, and I didn’t have children yet. Full-time job aside, I had the spare time and the willingness to take on the planning of our class reunion.

Let me just pause here to warn you that class reunion planning is not for the meek. It’s not for the weary. It’s time-consuming, and it’s aggravating at times. It took more than a year of researching how to plan a class reunion, locating classmates, convincing some stubborn classmates to attend and making preparations to pull off the event.

But it was worth it. You feel 16 again when you rediscover classmates you haven’t spoken to in years. And when the big event finally comes, it’s extremely satisfying to know that you helped bring everyone together again to relive some great memories and make new ones.

I consider our class reunion a success. About 70 classmates (plus their significant others) out of a class of 200 attended. That’s about 35 percent. From what I’ve read, a class reunion is successful if 40 percent of classmates attend. But I’m not sure how you can truly gauge the success of this kind of event by the numbers. What’s most important is that the people who participate have a fun and memorable time. We achieved that.

In this article and in a series of others in which I hope to go into more detail about various aspects of class reunion planning, I’d like to share the knowledge and experience I gained while planning my class reunion. Let’s get started with the first steps you should take to plan your class reunion. 

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