<p>I am a high school junior that has 500 hours of community service. Will this help me to get into the Ivies?</p>
<p>Nope
CS along won't take you to the Ivies
there are much more to do...</p>
<p>Could I use it as a hook, so I stand out?</p>
<p>It is not a major hook either
There are bunches of kids with even more hours applying to Ivies...
What else do you have?</p>
<p>It can help you, if you write about it passionately and fully demonstrate how much it means to you and how much it has affected you. Simply saying, "I did 500 hours! Yale, take me now!" will not quite work. The Ivies, as well as many other colleges, are used to seeing tons of kids touting their community service hours, when oftentimes they did it solely for the application. I wrote about my involvement with community service, which I've been doing in various ways since 7th grade. I showed committment and how it affected me, and how it led me to take leadership roles as a result. I didn't do 500 hours, but it's not the amount of hours you do that matters, but how meaningful those hours were. But in terms of Ivies, the sheer volume and quality of applications are so intense that you cannot count on community service alone to get you in, even if you really do love it. 500 hours is really impressive; congratulations and good luck with the college application process!</p>
<p>500 is a lot, but it is definately not a hook. It will help you, but it will not carry you into your schools.</p>
<p>I am still a freshman in high school. I didn't do any community service/sports/clubs/student gov this year, and I'm planning on take some C++ Programming classes over the summer at CCAC (local CC). I think I will do tennis next year, along with some classes at CCAC in the Fall and Spring and hopefully 100+ hours of community service. First of all, do summer classes and extra classes at CCs count when you apply to college. Do they make you look any better? Second, do you think that by senior year if I do 200+ CS and classes + atleast 2 years of Tennis and maintain a 3.8 UW GPA, I would be set for a good college like NYU? I'm thinking of going into medical, specifically dentistry. Also, I don't really have any clubs or such taht I'm interested in in my school. We have all the typical clubs, like key club, but no unique ones like something that has to do with computers or anything. I'm really not interested in any others. So do you guys have any ideas of anything extra I can do? Thanx in adv.</p>
<p>Start a club. Start an organization that interests you. Find something that you're passionate about and look around, not just in your school, but in your community, to see if there are any activities you can take part in/ contests you can enter/ whatever. If there isn't... start one! You can't be the only one in town that likes _______. See if there are national organizations you can start a chapter of at your school. Just find an activity you're able to be passionate about... you won't regret it.</p>