Welcome to Kansas University, and just as importantly, welcome to Lawrence, the city that will be your home the next four years.

You may still feel attached to your hometown and perhaps just see Lawrence as the place where you go to school. With this mentality, you will appreciate only the bare minimum of Lawrence — the restaurants, the grocery stores and the shopping areas. Maybe your attachment to your hometown is linked to the sense of the belonging you felt to the community there; you may have been a Girl Scout, an athlete or nursing home volunteer.

You may be coming from a small town where it was easy to be a part of everything that was going on, or maybe you are from a big city where you could pick and choose your activities. As you are making the adjustment to college life and becoming a Jayhawk, you also will have to make the adjustment to your new community, and you may feel lost without that sense of belonging.

My advice: Take that same initiative you employed in your hometown and experience Lawrence by taking an active interest in the Lawrence community. Learn about the Lawrence Arts Center, the Baker wetlands and the Farmers Market.

By becoming involved in these community efforts, you will leave college with a more valuable experience because you will be ready to make your way into the world as a concerned and active citizen. Obtaining this level of citizenship is valuable to the community and you because it gives you the opportunity to grow as a person and to develop your interests and passions. You may discover that you are a liberal, an environmentalist or that you have a passion for working with children. These discoveries are difficult to make within the confines of the university; they require some hands-on community involvement.

So I encourage you to take some time in these next few years and educate yourself outside the classroom by becoming a volunteer with a grade school or the homeless, attending Earth Day events at South Park or watching a powwow at Haskell Indian Nations University. You soon will learn that the community issues can have an effect on you as well. You can affect City Commission decisions such as the smoking ban, the housing ordinance and the proposed Wal-Mart, but only if you register to vote in Douglas County.

Kaelyn Fox McCall says getting involved in community efforts will prepare students to become concerned and active citizens. She is a 2004 Kansas University graduate in accounting/business administration, is former Center for Community Outreach co-director.

While in college you are empowered to make your own choices and will enjoy many new freedoms. This comes with added responsibility not only to yourself but also to the communities that surround you. I hope when you graduate and go out to find your dream job you also have laid the foundation for a life as an involved citizen.