Until fairly recently, when U.S. students left home for college, their contact with family decreased abruptly. They typically learned to make an increasing number of important decisions without parental consultation, and developed in predictable ways toward becoming autonomous, self-regulating adults. Moreover, if they chose to study abroad during college, the distance from home and costs of communication generally meant that they were in even less contact with friends and family, and were expected to benefit from both the cultural immersion and the growing independence such experiences offered. The proliferation of affordable and accessible modes of communication, however--email, smart phones, texting, Skype, Facetime, Facebook, Viber, WhatsApp, for example--has made it possible for college students to connect with those at home with a frequency that would have been unimaginable only a decade ago. In spite of a growing sense of concern about how such dramatically increased potential for communication might influence the study abroad experience (Huesca, 2013), only limited research on the subject has been conducted (e.g., Mikal & Grace, 2012). This study expands our prior research on student-parent communication during the college years to students studying abroad by exploring their connections with friends and family at home and how this technological connectedness may be related to the study abroad experience.