Graduating high school and moving miles away from home is one of the biggest transitions teenagers face. Maintaining past friendships and creating new ones is a daily struggle for college freshmen.

“My best friends from home and I will FaceTime literally everyday and text all the time,” University of Oklahoma freshman Maggie Compton said. “We usually catch up with each other over the weekends.”

Compton keeps her friends from high school updated with everything that happens to her while she is away from home.

“When something big happens in my life, I always tell my friends at home, and they basically know everything that has happened to me over the time that I’ve been at college,” Compton said. “When we all come back together, it feels like we’ve been home all year when we have actually been miles apart from each other.”

Some former graduates keep in touch by visiting each other at their college campuses.

“I have stayed in touch with far fewer friends from high school than I thought I would,” Texas Tech University freshman JT Dawson said. “I pretty much only still talk to the people that were my closest friends. I have visited them at their schools, and they have come to visit me also, so it’s really cool being able to see them every once in a while.”

For some college students, long distances and time apart aren’t a detrimental factor to friendships from high school.

“It’s not like there is a lot of things to catch up on when we come back together,” University of Tennessee at Knoxville freshman Allison Dillard said. “I can just be like, ‘Hey let’s get food,’ and they’ll already know everything that is going on in my life and cut out the small talk, or we can just take a nap and watch movies like we used to.”

However easy it is to fall back into familiar routines, it doesn’t mean the move away from home automatically feels natural.

“Sometimes I feel like I live in a parallel universe,” Dillard said. “It’s weird having a completely different life in a completely different state. It’s weird coming back home where I have a different friend group than I have in Tennessee. It’s hard because when I’m back home, all I do is think about my life at school and when I’m there, I feel like all I do is think about my life at home. It’s a really difficult transition and is hard to get used to.”

Compton’s life now at the University of Oklahoma is very different than it was in high school, but she still continues to maintain strong friendships with her high school friends even though they live hundreds of miles away from her.

“I will talk about my life at school to my friends at home, and it’s just weird because I’m not used to not having my best friends there with me all the time,” Compton said. “I have a completely different life now, and everything has changed so much. This is the first time there has been a big part of my life that they’re not a part of. It is crazy how much my life has changed within the past year.”