DOWAGIAC — Incoming freshmen at Southwestern Michigan College spent their Friday getting their hands dirty and getting to know the downtown Dowagiac community.

SMC students spent Friday morning out in the community as part of a scheduled community service day during SMC’s Welcome Week, a week of planned activities designed to welcome and orient incoming students with the campus and community. All around town, there were groups of students, each led by an older SMC student, working on community projects, from garden and upkeep at ACTION Ministries to painting downtown and at Rotary Park.

Friday marked the first time that the college has hosted a community service day during Welcome Week. The day is fitting with a larger push from SMC to integrate itself with the Dowagiac community, which includes partnering with downtown businesses to offer students discounts and a Downtown at Dusk event, which took place Thursday.

“We want to gets kids involved and right out of the gate doing service,” said Joe Odenwald, vice president of student services at SMC. “We want our students to know the city and be involved.”

For the students who participated in the community service day Friday, they said that they enjoyed themselves and that giving back to Dowagiac during welcome week made them feel more comfortable in the community.

Alejantra Torrez and Luz Morenl, both 17 years old and of Hartford, Michigan, were edging and shoveling the grass on the sidewalks outside of ACTION ministries Friday. They said that though they did community service in high school, they were excited to take part in the community service day, as working in a new city made the community service feel brand new.

“I think this is getting us close to the city people wise and interacting wise,” Torrez said. “It’s nice to be helping out the community where we will be living.”

Morenl added that being out in the community Friday morning allowed her to get a feel for the city and get to know where everything is.

“Because I’m not from around here, that’s pretty cool,” she said. “I’ll probably be coming back here to do stuff while I’m in college.”

Overseeing the work of a group of students including Torrez and Morenl was Sarah Bute. Bute, 20, was a Welcome Week leader in her second year at SMC, guiding students through the Welcome Week experience that she experienced last year. She said she thought the community service day was a good idea and that she wished it had been in place last year, as it would have helped her, a native of Elkhart, to get to know Dowagiac.

“This opens students up a lot more. They are really shy on the first day, and they don’t want to come out of their rooms, so I think this is really opening them up to new opportunities,” she said. “I think this makes them feel good and gives them a sense of giving back. … I think it would have really helped me if we did this during my Welcome Week. I think I would have met a lot more people, too.”