Importance of volunteering for CMU

Colleges and Universities A-Z Carnegie Mellon University
1

Hey,

I’m RD applying to CMU CS and haven’t done much volunteer work outside of my required hours. CMU says volunteering experience is on their “very important” list, and I wonder how bad it is if my Common App doesn’t have volunteering on my activity list.
How many (%) people who get into CMU CS did not have dedicated volunteering activities?

Thanks!

2

In general, as far as I know, simply doing some simple volunteer hours is almost never helpful for admission. The key is to found your area of interest, and how do you determine how much time to invest into volunteer work for that interests that you have?

For example, if you are passionate about CS, find a way to help your local community with web development or data analysis, and put those volunteering hours in it. It will help you more than just put saying 300 hours in some general volunteer work in your application.

hope you good luck in your application.