Writing Something People Will Actually Read at a Reunion
I spent three years volunteering for my high school class reunion committee, which meant I ended up reviewing dozens of biographies before they went into the program. Most of them were either embarrassing laundry lists of generic achievements or so modest they read like filler. The ones that worked had a specific structure and a willingness to be genuinely interesting rather than generically impressive. The basic format is straightforward. You're writing 75 to 150 words about someone who is going to be sitting across a room from their former classmates in a few months. The goal isn't career summary. The goal is to give people enough of a hook to strike up a conversation. A good reunion bio answers three questions without sounding like a resume: What happened to this person? Are they interesting? Can I talk to them? Here is a practical example that fell into the "worked well" category. It was for a guy named Marcus who graduated fifteen years prior:
Marcus Chen (Class of 2009) spent the last decade working in structural engineering after a brief detour teaching math in New Orleans. He now lives in Austin with his wife and two dogs and still plays pickup basketball on Thursday nights. He misses the old cafeteria pizza. Reach him at marcuschen@email.com if you want to reconnect. That is 68 words. It tells you what he does, where he lives, what he does for fun, and gives people an easy entry point. No dramatic flair. No "passionate visionary." Just facts that make it easy for someone to say hello. Another example that worked because it had actual personality. This was for someone whose career path was harder to summarize in a sentence:
Tanya Okafor (Class of 2011) has done some weird things since graduation. She worked in documentary filmmaking for five years, then went back to school for social work, and now runs a community nonprofit in Atlanta. She is currently getting her master's degree part-time and occasionally texts the group chat just to check in. Her last name is pronounced OH-kah-for, not OK-for, which she still gets wrong three years into adulthood. 112 words. Specific, honest, and memorable. The self-deprecating note at the end makes it feel like a real person wrote it, which is exactly what you want. Now here is the thing most people miss when they write these. You should lead with the most conversation-starting detail, not necessarily the most impressive one. A person who runs a community nonprofit is more interesting to a reunion crowd than someone who is a mid-level accountant, even if the accountant makes more money. The bio is social currency, not a LinkedIn headline. Write the thing that makes someone lean forward when they read it.
Get the Full Details
I ran into a specific problem during the 2019 reunion cycle that probably won't surprise anyone but bears mentioning. About forty percent of the biographies we received came in as three-paragraph wall of text with no editing whatsoever. People treated them like formal bios for professional conferences. I spent roughly six hours cutting and restructuring submissions for the class of 2014, which is time no volunteer should spend doing manually when a simple template could prevent the issue entirely. The workaround I ended up implementing was a bare-bones form with four required fields and a word limit of 150. Name, current location, what you do now, and one sentence about something personal or funny. No essay box. No optional narrative section. It cut the volume of unusable submissions by about seventy-five percent and gave the whole process from collection to finalized program in about two weeks instead of the usual six. There are also formatting choices that matter more than people realize. Keep the name and graduation year at the top in bold. That's the only formatting most people will notice because they are scanning quickly. Put contact information at the very end or not at all depending on whether you want to protect privacy. A lot of people in their thirties and forties do not want their email in a document that gets printed and handed around a banquet hall. A phone number or a DM-on-Social-Media note is often better.
If you are the one writing your own bio and you are struggling to find the right tone, here is a technique that helps. Write it in the third person first so you strip away any need to impress anyone. Then read it aloud. If it sounds like something you would actually say to someone at a bar, you are close. If it sounds like a press release, cut half of it and add something human. Some common pitfalls worth noting. Avoid mentioning ex-spouses, legal troubles, or anything that could alienate a room of people who are already in an awkward social situation. Avoid listing every job you have ever had. One or two career mentions maximum. And do not use humor that requires context only your inner circle would understand. The whole point is for people who haven't seen you in fifteen years to feel like they can start a conversation. The downside of the short-form approach is that it leaves out nuance. A person might have gone through a really difficult period between graduation and now and want that to show. The format doesn't always allow space for that, and some people feel pressured to make everything sound positive and polished. If that is your situation, a single honest sentence is usually enough. "Took some time to figure things out. Now in a better place." That works. It is specific and it is real without being a trauma dump in a reunion program.
For people compiling these, the bigger bottleneck is usually getting responses from classmates who simply ignore the request. I found that sending a personal message rather than a bulk email increased response rates from roughly twenty percent to somewhere around fifty-five percent. People are busy and they skim. A subject line like "Hey, do you want to be in the reunion bio?" gets a faster reply than "Please submit your biography for the upcoming reunion program." Here is one more complete example that covers a wider range of life circumstances, which is more realistic than the polished versions: Devin Patel (Class of 2008) lives in Charlotte with his daughter and works in logistics for a regional shipping company. He got married three years after graduation and divorced four years later, which he says taught him more about himself than any class he took in college. He still goes to church on Sundays and coaches youth soccer on weekends. He hopes to run into some of his old debate team friends at the reunion and finally settle the argument about whether Lincoln was the best president or not.
That is 98 words. It includes career, family, a hardship mentioned plainly, hobbies, and a conversational hook. It is honest and accessible. Nothing dramatic about it. If you need templates to get started, the structure is always the same regardless of the format you choose. Name and year first. Current location and general occupation second. One or two specific details that make the person sound like a person. Optional contact info last. Everything else is noise. I stopped trying to make these sound impressive about five years ago. The reunion crowd doesn't care about your title. They care about whether you are someone they would want to talk to over a beer. Writing for that audience is simpler than most people think once you stop trying to curate a version of yourself that won't embarrass anyone.
