<p>Two friends had a tiff about community service. Mom1 was boasting about her son's community service hours. Mom2 responded that the boy should list only those hours above and beyond what the school requires for graduation.</p>
<p>My impulse was to agree with Mom2, but I recall that D's school had a mandatory activities/athletics requirement which most students satisfied by joining a sports team. D and her teammates listed the team as an EC, even though participation was mandatory. (Likewise, kids who opted for debater or other approved activities listed them as ECs.)</p>
<p>Is service somehow different b/c it is impliedly voluntary?</p>
<p>Yes, it’s still community service. The few colleges that factor such things into admission care more about what exactly one did for community service than they care about the hours one did the service. Organizing projects, raising money, doing things like that are far more impressive to such colleges than, for instance, having lots of hours of random CS activities without any leadership role or real impact.</p>
<p>Yes, community service is still community service if it is mandated by the school or ordered by the Judge, but in my view, service that comes “from the heart” is different.</p>
<p>Being motivated by a requirement is not the same as being self-motivated to help others or give back to the community. However, I am surely not the first parent to observe a blitz of community service activity by some students, motivated largely or solely by a desire to feature it on the college application resume. Are they in some way superior to those who started because of a requirement?</p>
<p>A student who does community service initially for non-altruistic reasons can still learn from the experience, possibly develop a new appreciation of the needs of others and the joy of giving.</p>
<p>Some adults are partially motivated, in their community service, by the resume-building value of being a Board member of a non-profit, or even the networking possibilities. Not the stuff of sainthood, perhaps; but still often involves serious and substantial contribution to a cause.</p>
<p>I am always dismayed by the underlying notion that x hundred hours of community service are less valuable than 2x hours, ipso facto, and the apparent motivation to maximize that number.</p>
<p>There’s a lot more that goes into meaningful community service than the original reason one was motivated and the number of hours so devoted.</p>
<p>Sports participation would be " involvement" with the community- if that means something like a neighborhood or school community- but it wouldn’t be " community" service.</p>
<p>Community service is work that does not benefit the doer directly.</p>
<p>Everything my kids did was “from the heart”. But that didn’t stop them from submitting the forms to have it count towards their graduation requirement.</p>
<p>“Yes, community service is still community service if it is mandated by the school or ordered by the Judge, but in my view, service that comes “from the heart” is different.”</p>
<p>I don’t care how heartfelt the service was. What really matters is what was accomplished by the service.</p>
<p>Around here it is required for graduation and most of them don’t know what they did! I think it counts as long as you can explain what you did. In my opinion, community service is one of the most easily manipulated aspects of applications. It is easy to embellish and hard to verify.</p>
<p>Does it serve the community? Then it’s community service. I don’t think the motives for community service are particularly relevant (and if they are relevant they we should start to question all the millions of teens who do community service not simply out of the goodness of their hearts but because they know it helps with college admissions and scholarships).</p>
<p>BTW…if a man is drafted into the military, but stays longer than he has to, he doesn’t only count those extra years as “service to his country.”</p>
<p>Think of it this way: If your child’s high school requires two years of foreign language for graduation, but your child took four years, he would list all four years on his application.</p>
<p>What’s so different about listing all of his community service activities, both those that met a requirement and those that did not?</p>