One of my friends recently went to Indonesia to work as a volunteer for victims of the tsunami. He said that volunteer work in a foreign country greatly boosts your image in the eyes of an admissions officer and greatly increases your chance for admission to colleges that you wouldn’t have been accepted to had you not had the experience. Is this true? Would service overseas be looked upon as superior to that at a local hospital or library? If so, how important is this factor?
Thanks!
<p>It's all about presentation and how much you've genuinely dedicated yourself to the cause. Are you doing it just because you are doing it for college purposes? If you are, then that won't have the impact desired. However, if the cause is genuine and the effect likewise, then I'm sure it will factor into your admissions.</p>
<p>It's not true. That's because a lot of students are able to do such volunteer work simply because their family is well off or because they happen to have relatives in a foreign country. </p>
<p>Colleges are impressed by opportunities that students create for themselves. Thus, a student who creates a major volunteer program or opportunity in their hometown would be more impressive to colleges than would be a student whose parents paid for and arranged for the students to volunteer abroad.</p>
<p>yeah, what tlaktan said. as impressive as volunteer work in a foreign country sounds, it is very COMMON. almost every religious high school I know of has mission trips to foreign countries. For ex, my high school has 200 students alltogether. It's one of the cheapest religious private schools in the area. We send at least 50 students a year to foreign countries for volunteer work. Than within 50 miles, theres at least a handful of schools even larger than my school that send EVEN MORE kids on mission trips. take in to mind how big the united states is , were talking at least tens of thousands of kids who go on mission trips with either their high school or church.</p>
<p>Furthermore it is asia. If you have connections in Asian countries you can probably "volunteer" without volunteering.</p>
<p>volunteer because its beneficial to others;
don't do it for such a superficial cause like college.</p>
<p>I agree to what tlaktan said, but how can colleges tell if your work was truly something you were passionate about? My friend claimed that the only way this can be measured is through one's essays, which can make the experience sound better than it actually was.</p>
<p>Northstarmom, colleges would probably look highly upon self-created volunteer opportunities, but if we look solely at what is considered "typical" community service and service in a foreign country, would service in a foreign country stand out more?</p>
<p>"but if we look solely at what is considered "typical" community service and service in a foreign country, would service in a foreign country stand out more?"</p>
<p>The service in a foreign country would stand out more at less competitive colleges, particularly those that don't get a lot of wealthy applicants.At church related colleges, mission-oriented foreign service would make students stand out and could lead to merit aid.</p>
<p>At the most competitive colleges, the service in a foreign country would be worth about the same as typical community service. In other words, it would not make the candidates stand out at all.</p>
<p>The adcoms would realize that the only difference would be that candidates with "ordinary" foreign community service (meaning service that was not truly created by the student, and where the student didn't raise the money to go), would have well off parents who could foot the bill for the travel or would be immigrants' kids who did volunteer work while going on an otherwise ordinary trip to visit their grandparents or would be students doing church-arranged missionary work.</p>
<p>For kids of immigrants, since their grandparents are likely to live abroad, it is fairly ordinary to go abroad for the summer to visit their relatives. That's the same as occurs in the states when people take summer trips to another state for family reunions.</p>
<p>"My friend claimed that the only way this can be measured is through one's essays, which can make the experience sound better than it actually was."</p>
<p>The interviews, essays and possibly the recommendations can reflect the depth of the student's interest. </p>
<p>Most students who do things abroad write essays that sound like travelogues or simply activity lists. The students who truly are passionate about what they have done will write about how a relatively small incident affected them.</p>
<p>They will not write a cliche essay about how they learned that "people are people" or how "people in the world don't live as well as I do in the US."</p>
<p>thank you, northstarmom!</p>