<p>soory if wrong forum but how many volunteer hours do you need to gather for i dont know... the UC'S OR stanford? everyone here is almost always like 200 +. i am planning to go for about 100, maybe a little less. but its a place i like , just that i wont have time senior year to go over or even reach 100 hours. is this bad for the colleges i have mentioned?</p>
<p>I would say that your amount of volunteer hours would depend on your other EC’s. Do you play a sport? Do you participate in clubs/competitions after school? Do you have a job? Obviously if you do these sorts of things, you would not be able to get as many volunteer hours as someone who mainly just volunteers after school. This should be reflected in your EC section of your applications.</p>
<p>Zero.</p>
<p>For competitive universities such as the ones you’ve mentioned, you need to do something constructive and productive with the out-of-school hours that you don’t spend on homework and studying. But almost anything productive will do. Volunteering is fine. So is playing competitive tennis, or playing the cello, or being the master carpenter for school plays, or being involved in mock trial, or working for pay, or helping run the family business–or really, almost anything on the tame side of running a prostitution ring and making meth in your garage.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter much at all that much what you do, but it does matter what you make out of what you do. You’ll be a much more competitive applicant if you can demonstrate personal growth or increased competence or additional maturity year by year, or if you can talk intelligently about how your extracurricular activities have shaped the person you’re becoming. (For example, “That mission trip to Central America really convinced me how important it is that we have ongoing aid to developing countries that’s apolitical and non-governmental,” or even, “After eight years of lessons, I finally realized that I’m glad I can play piano, but music just doesn’t interest me as much as politics.”)</p>