Norma Ochoa (freshman-nutrition) is looking forward to spending her summer back home in Orange County, Calif.

But spending so much time on the opposite side of the country has Ochoa already thinking about how she will keep in touch with the friends she has made this year in Happy Valley.

Luckily, modern technology has stepped in and made it as easy as the click of a mouse to contact friends. No matter where students call home this summer, the increase in technology and methods of communication have made it easy to keep connected to the people students are closest to at Penn State.

“I feel like AIM and Facebook will be the main sources of keeping in touch, but since the time difference is three hours back home, leaving Facebook wall posts will be a lot more convenient,” Ochoa said.

Options such as Facebook, instant messenger and e-mail allow for instant communication with people who could be hours away.

“I’m grateful for technology, because you can’t compare the instant messaging online to the weeks that it would take to send a letter,” Ochoa said.

Gerry Santoro, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, has noticed students’ desires to get an instant response from their friends.

“I think the majority of communication is with text messaging and instant messenger that is shorter, more asynchronous and allows you to build buddy lists,” Santoro said. “The other big one is Facebook, which students check multiple times a day and it becomes their major source of communication.”

Increases in technology have provided many options for students to keep in close contact with their friends, Santoro said.

For students who don’t have time zone changes to deal with, communicating with friends this summer could be as simple as sending a text or making a call. That’s how Samantha Curr (freshman-premedicine) plans to keep in contact with her friends.

“I’d say we are going to try and keep in touch with cell phones because I never really respond to Facebook, and we will text a lot,” said Curr, who will be spending her summer at home in Massachusetts.

Some students who will be spending their summers abroad have found alternative ways to continue feeling close to their family and friends back home, such as Skype.

Skype, an online calling service that can incorporate a Web camera, is free to join and allows users to talk free from “Skype to Skype” or add credit to an account and call out to landlines or cell phones.

“The rates for me to call home are only .02 euro cents a minute, which is really cheap compared to what I would be paying using a phone,” Nicole Strohl (junior-hotel, restaurant and institutional management) wrote in an e-mail.

Strohl is currently studying abroad in Spain and will be there until the end of May. Using Skype has made the distance from Spain to home not seem as bad, she said.

“It’s also nice because you can use a Web cam and see the people you are talking to and you can use it to chat just like AIM,” Strohl wrote.

With all the advancements in technology, the distance between students and their college friends now seems to be much shorter than before.

“The trend for students is more in mobility,” Santoro said, “and I think that newer technology is supporting that kind of communication.”