<p>hold with me here, lol.</p>
<p>I only have about 10 hours of volunteer work. Pitiful, I know.</p>
<p>I will plan on volunteering some before I apply but would colleges actually know if I said I had 50 volunteer hours, versus an actual 30? I'm not saying I'll actually fake it, but I'm curious</p>
<p>Community service hours will be in High School Transcript. My school required minimum 75 hours.</p>
<p>No college requires a single volunteer hour. What you’re considering lying about means nothing to colleges. It’s a myth.</p>
<p>Things that you can “fake” on your application colleges put considerably less weight into. So it isn’t even worth it. If you think your hours are pitiful then just don’t put it down</p>
<p>No, unless they are reported on your transcript or put them under activities that could be verified (i.e a hospital). Should you do it? No.</p>
<p>Generally there is no way to check things like that unless you’re in a program that records it on your transcript or something. But be careful. If you list something like that and you are at a school with an interview option and you exercise that option, it becomes very clear if there is a large discrepancy between your listed hours and what you can say about it.</p>
<p>Every word of posts #3 & 4 is true.</p>
<p>Which means that this would be a lie not worth the telling.</p>
<p>And I heard that some schools will do a random background check. I read somewhere that UC Berkeley does this just so that people will not fake just because they don’t want to be that unlucky one</p>
<p>I know that most colleges don’t require it, but it seems that everybody has tons of hours and seem like generally better people than me lol. I don’t know where to get the time, honestly. Is it an important part of applications generally, or no? For reference my top two schools are Tulane and Emory. Other choices are Umiami, BU, NYU, Carnegie, but I generally like it in the south better</p>
<p>You’ve gotten your answer - don’t cheat.</p>
<p>You are better off skipping the listing of your ten hours, skipping worrying about this issue and spending your time on doing a thorough job of writing about what you were actually doing with your time.</p>
<p>
</p>
<ol>
<li><p>CC is not representative of the general population.</p></li>
<li><p>Lying won’t make you a “generally better” person like them.</p></li>
<li><p>They make time.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>It is generally an important part of the application, but you can have other things that make up for a lack of volunteering (like extracurriculars, jobs, awards, etc.). If you’re really concerned about this keeping you out of a college you would like to go to, take some time off to do meaningful work. But you can get into a good school without hundreds of volunteer hours.</p>
<p>The amount of kids that do 10 hours but add a zero to it are likely legion. I agree that volunteering is likely meaningless.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well put, baktrax!</p>
<p>I think the more important question is…how do you spend your time outside of school? If you do absolutely nothing (no sport, no time-consuming EC, no part-time job), you may come across as uninteresting or self-absorbed. Some colleges won’t care about this at all, but others might. Still, I wouldn’t lie.</p>
<p>Where they get the time? They do that volunteering over the course of many weeks. 60 hours is 6 hours a week over 10 weeks, or 2 hours a week over 20 weeks. 20 weeks is only 5 months, so you could volunteer once a week for 5 months and have 60 hours.</p>