<p>I'm currently a junior in high school, and just started volunteering a few days ago. I'm planning to volunteer for the whole spring break and every weekend until senior year. Can college track down the dates/time you volunteered for community service?</p>
<p>Colleges don’t care enough to check out all the times that you worked community service
Just give them an estimate and write a meaningful essay about it…
That’s all they expect. That’s all that they want</p>
<p>Of course, Harvard has agents stationed at every soup kitchen! But really, no. Do what the poster above me said.</p>
<p>But I just recently started volunteering, I’ve never volunteer before (freshman-sophomore) Would college suspect something? & Is it better to have more volunteer hours but stack up within a few month or have less volunteer hours/credits but more longevity and consistency?</p>
<p>I don’t think you understand how colleges see your community service hours…</p>
<p>On the common app there is an “activities” section.
You will list the name of the organization you do community service for.
You will be asked your role in the organization/ what you did for them (very, very brief)
You will be asked about how many hours a week you work for the community service organization, how many weeks a year, and which years you were involved in it
These aren’t free-response questions. They are fill-in the blank responses, and you are expected to just estimate.</p>
<p>Colleges want meaningful experiences, not hours.</p>
<p>One of my pet peeves is all the “If I have X number of hours is that good enough to get me into Y College?” threads. It’s not about racking up points, it’s about doing something useful and learning from it. I get suspicious of a student’s motives when they list their volunteer experiences as “200 hours of community service” instead of “worked for the past two years as a peer tutor” or “spent the summer at a camp for disabled kids” or “ran food drives for my local food pantry”, and I suspect admissions officers do too.</p>
<p>Now I’ll climb off my soapbox to answer the OP’s question (and really OP, yours is not particularly egregious, it just happens to be the post where I snapped :-)).</p>
<p>If you use the common app. you will be asked to check off boxes listing the years in which your activities occurred and to list the average hours per week you worked. So in your case, assuming you continue your CS, you would check the boxes for 11th and 12th grades, list the number of weeks you worked and divide your total hours by the number of weeks. Do not try to fudge this as you never know when you’ll meet up with an OA who knows more about the organization you volunteered for than you think. I have a friend who is an alumni interviewer who has caught a few kids in these kinds of lies and believe me it did not end well for the applicant.</p>
<p>So if I volunteer in the spring break and every weekend would college suspect that I’m just doing a minute catch up? If thats the case, wouldn’t it be better not do any community service? I’m still not sure if I should volunteer over the spring break or spend the time doing my HW.</p>
<p>No they dont but if you lie And you get accepted and the college finds out, your acceptance will most likely get rescinded.</p>
<p>I would recommend doing the volunteer work, and tracking the dates. I wrote down all of D’s volunteer/EC’s on a calendar, and saved them…although a notebook would work. It as VERY helpful when she was doing scholarship applications and for some of the college applications.</p>
<p>Some students get pulled for an EC audit…if you lied you lose. So don’t go there.</p>
<p>I didn’t say anything about lying. I’m just asking that if I volunteer a little late would that be a side effect for college application?</p>
<p>What can I lie about? I’m only asking if my acceptance rate will go lower if I only volunteered on my junior and senior year.</p>
<p>sorry, misread your post. I would think volunteering now and in the summer (ie jr/sr year) would be fine. Some organizations have age limits, etc so I suspect this is fairly common. I’d volunteer with the same organization (consistancy counts).</p>
<p>Let me see if I understand this right. You’re asking if colleges will track down your community service dates to check if you’re padding your resume since you’re only performing community service to pad your resume?!?</p>
<p>Your choices are:</p>
<ol>
<li>“Catch-up” on your service and let the chips fall where they may.</li>
<li>Massage the dates to make it look like you started in September of your junior year not the summer after junior year.</li>
<li>Keep acting like a self-centered teenager and realize that in your case a few desultory hours of non-committed community service will have virtually no impact on your admissions results.</li>
</ol>
<p>Personally I like options 1 or 3. At least there’s no pretense with those two.</p>
<p>OP: you are seriously placing too much emphasis on vol hrs as if they are some essential of college admissions. Hate to break a myth for you: they aren’t.</p>
<p>read carefully what vinceh said. Truth in that.</p>