College offers an overwhelming amount of options for students and especially in terms of organizations.

As incoming students attend orientation over the next few weeks will soon learn, the situation at every organization fair becomes equally overwhelming — when faced with hundreds of booths for organizations, volunteer opportunities or a menagerie of other seemingly wonderful commitments, many incoming freshmen will naturally sign up for every email list they can get their overanxious hands on.

Whether by obligation under the gaze of an overenthusiastic booth-tender or by actual interest in what the organization has to offer, incoming students end up with a bag full of business cards, brochures, pamphlets and random sheets of paper with interest meeting dates, phone numbers or names on them.

Like clockwork, this is fine and good until fall semester comes around, when inboxes begin to overflow with emails from clubs students don’t remember signing up for or are slowly realizing they don’t actually have time for.

Yet, instead of unsubscribing from these emails, the staff at the North Wind challenges incoming students to respond to them, get curious and follow through with the organizations that seem exciting. Attend the interest meetings.

Go to the weekly gatherings. Participate in an event put on by one of these organizations this fall.

Not only will it provide an opportunity to meet members of the NMU community, but it will help to shape the college experience into one based on active participation, not on simply sitting in a classroom and listening to a professor speak hypothetically about the world.

Become established as a participant early on, and it will more likely persist throughout college.

So, intrepid freshmen and transfer students, sign away. Get excited about the opportunities that Northern has to offer — they are certainly worth getting excited about. Go ahead and sign up for the Sailing Club even if you’ve never sailed or the College Libertarian club despite the fact that you may not know exactly what Libertarianism entails.

But when the time comes to begin attending meetings, do it. The active engagement of incoming and current students will continue to benefit the NMU and Marquette community with ideas and participation.