<p>Now, out of curiosity, compared to all those other people at my school who have a bajillion hours in Key Club, how doomed am I?</p>
<p>Key Club is a pretty pathetic organization. Most of their members are stat-padders who don’t care about actually helping the community and thus put very little effort into their work.</p>
<p>Depending on the club, Rotary Interact is probably a much better alternative due to less regulation. Key clubs are so heavily regulated that they can’t really do anything productive.</p>
<p>What the hell even is Key Club?</p>
<p>^
I like to think of it as glorified community service. It’s a bunch of selfish kid pretending to care by volunteering 40 or so hours a year at various, disconnected community service events that would have happened without their involvement. Needless to say, they could have done that same community service without having to be in a club to do it.</p>
<p>^I am the VP of our Key Club and I have to agree with this- much of it is meaningless, and doesn’t get to the true meaning of service, especially if you live in a wealthy community. It’s what I call rich community service. I’m writing my college essay about breaking out of that bubble and getting involved in a program that allowed me to meet on the streets with the homeless in the roughest parts of Seattle.</p>
<p>hmmm. well I do not think people are selfish and do not care simply because they are part of a key club, but there are a lot of kids in it who do it just to pad a resume. I am a Lt. Governor, and personally I care a lot about helping people. I got 4 local clubs to sponsor 2 Habitat for Humanity builds this year, and we do a ton of other things. It really depends on how deeply committed you were to the club. I def do not take the tradition all that seriously, but I respect the general point of service for high school students. It will only look good on your resume if you did something. Out of the 50 members at our school maybe 20 do a lot to actually help- so yes a lottt of people join and are simply lazy. And helping out at concession stands and the local pumpkin run, not what we are about. That should be one of the small extra things your club is doing, not the main thing. If a community org needs helpers, we are there, but we are mostly for large-scale fundraisers to help our service partners- the March of Dimes, Childrens Miracle Network, and Unicef.
Our past President is at Princeton, and while other things helped her, she cared about the club and used it as a way to show her dedication to being a committed community member. </p>
<p>I really hope your desire for key club kids to automatically get rejected does not become a reality, cause considering all of the work I do for that organization, that would suck for me.</p>
<p>If this is the general 3rd party perspective, maybe I should write that into an essay or something. But really, I do not thinking bashing any organization that is internationally recognized to promote leadership, character, and service is a very good idea.</p>
<p>to the OP: if that is one of the 10 ECs you have, and within the club, you are one of those “not very involved” people, it is not necessary to keep coming back. If it is 1 of your 3 ECs, maybe stick with it, and get more involved immediately.</p>
<p>@Jaysha: Haha, I haven’t been very active in it…most of the stuff is during Saturday mornings when I have Chinese school, or other times that conflict with my schedule. I admire the people who actually care and are committed though.</p>
<p>I guess it depends on where you are. My son has 200 hours of community service through Key Club that involove working at a food bank, homeless shelter, and nursing home. For us it is just an umbrella organization for his projects. Sorry you had a bad experience, but in some areas Key Club leads to a lifetime with the organization. Our local Kiwannis is probably the most involved group in town.</p>
<p>Quit and do something you care about. Being in a club just to put it on your application is a total waste of space.</p>
<p>At my school, the girl’s key club has good intentions, yet, while the girls are nice, they are stat-padders for the most part. They do some things like paint the bathrooms (although they clearly are bad at this, as every bathroom is now a bright headache red with bad stenciling on the walls) and sing to old people at christmas… However, the boy’s key club is hell on earth. Only the beer-pong fanatic football and lax players are in the club, and they get nothing done. Even their sponsor was ashamed. I was on the school paper and tried to get in contact with the sponsor to write an article on service during the holidays. Apparently he was so desperate to hide the fact that they had done nothing that he would not reply to my emails and was never in his class when I cam to look for him. A note I left on his laptop during a 1st visit was crumpled up in the trash when I came back.</p>
<p>Key club is pathetic, especially at my school. 90% of the time, they are collecting money or just selling wreaths and candy around the holidays. The sad thing is that none of the money goes to charity. It just goes to fund the key club and to send the kids to the convention at the end of the year where the guys try to get enough courage to talk to girls</p>
<p>Honestly, if that is really what your Key Club is doing, then they should be reported to the District Administrator or Governor. </p>
<p>If Key Club is pathetic, then I am not quite sure that any club dedicated to service has any hope to be effective at all. The point is to encourage students to help their communities, and to provide them with an outlet to do so. </p>
<p>If you would like to spend your time bashing clubs like that, do not expect any one to respect you as a human being. If you do not want to join because you do not like service, good for you. Don’t join. If you do not want to join your school’s club because it sucks and you do not feel like you can participate with that particular group of people, don’t join. I perfectly understand that a few clubs and sponsors simply suck. The people who do join and then waste the opportunity are lazy morons, and they can be treated as such. Do not blame the organization.</p>
<p>Oh, good, enough people in this thread hate Key Club enough so that I don’t have to post my hate for it too.</p>
<p>Key Club is a joke and it’s sad that some people probably think that it’s not a joke.</p>
<p>Cornell itself was gorgeous, but there was something about Ithaca I didn’t like.</p>
<p>I just didn’t feel like Ithaca’s atmosphere was right enough for me to call it my home for four years.</p>
<p>I think we have a key club at my school. Based on the responses here, I’m so glad I didn’t join. I have to admit, I kinda did my hours to pad out my resume (especially when I wanted to do real work, but found my volunteering place was basically having me pick up trash all day), but I think trying to put all pretense under a club seems even more ridiculous. I hope admission officers have picked up on this so everyone can stop wasting their time.</p>
<p>I’d first like to say that these are all unsubstantiated and unfounded arguments, at the least, based off of a few encounters with self-driven ‘stat-padders.’ I’m currently a Lieutenant Governor and have been a Key Club member going on three years and could not be more proud of this organization. It has provided me a home away from home with people I can trust, who aren’t in it for the ‘hours’ but to truly better the world around us. While the occasional resume-builders do exist, in the last few years I have only witnessed a group of selfless and caring individuals aimed to making a change. I appreciate and respect the history Key Club has and the International recognition that goes with it- which, evidently, was NOT earned by a bunch of lazy, self-absorbed members “who don’t care about actually helping the community and thus put very little effort into their work.” If you can’t tell, I care so much about this organization and am forever grateful for how it has made me grow as a person. Although you may have different opinions based on your own personal experiences, I don’t believe that trashing it by generalizing that all members are in it just to further boost their resume is the way to go. Instead of automatically focusing negative energy towards the organization because you think the service projects are unproductive/the members are not committed/etc, how about become involved and do something about it? Nothing can be accomplished by talk. Take action and ‘be the change you wish to see in the world.’ You might surprise yourself by how much good you can do.</p>