<p>I heard you should have around (or at least) 150 hours? Or is that low? Idk. Help me out! Thanks so much!</p>
<p>To be quite honest volunteer hours alone is not going to help you get anywhere.</p>
<p>meadow.. lets try to be a bit more helpful haha.</p>
<p>Well, there is no mark that you have to reach to be considered competitive. Volunteer hours alone will not decide your admission. However, same can be said for GPA, Test Scores and virtually everything else. It is your app. as a whole that will determine your app. Having dedicated volunteering helps a lot. 150+ is a good mark. Remember not to join anything and everything. Pick a few and put a lot of hours into it. Colleges like to see dedication.</p>
<p>meadow36: i thought volunteering was an important EC. For example if you volunteer 20 weeks a yr/7 hrs a week, it would help a lot. I hope so, as I have put a lot of time into doing just that. I worked my way up to being manager of the thrift shop's clothing intake and shipment of goods overseas. Of course, this is just 1 EC as I have balanced time with other sports(captain/awards) and clubs(VP and Pres), but i was under the impression that my volunteering would be looked upon highly.</p>
<p>orange41: Think less in terms of numbers and more in terms of quality and impact. That's the way college admissions officers are thinking about it. Volunteering is a worthwhile pursuit, but only if you're doing it because you really want to do it, not as just something that will enhance your college application. The purpose of community service is to help those less fortunate than you or to improve your community, and college admissions officers are not looking for a monolithic cut-off number from everyone. The low-income kid who has to work to help feed his family may only be able to give 2 hours a week volunteering at a soup kitchen, but his contribution may be considered more worthy than the kid who racks up 150+ hours but it's clear that he scrambled to do it because he wanted to get into a school.</p>
<p>So the most important thing about volunteering or performing service is to find a service position you really like and that you feel you are making a great impact with, and to work in that. It doesn't how many hours you can give; what's much more important is what you're getting out of it. Part of the reason that admissions officials ask this question is because they want to gauge the likelihood that a student will continue to serve their community in college. If they want students with a high likelihood and ascertain that your likelihood is low, even 1000 hours won't help you.</p>
<p>schoolsearching: Volunteering is an extra-curricular activity that is no more and no less important than any other. The value of its 'help' is relative to what else is on your application. There's no perfect combination of volunteering, clubs, sports, and other stats that will get you into top schools -- I've known students who got into top schools with very little or no hours of volunteering.</p>
<p>Having done some alumni interviewing for my alma mater, I have to say that I don't like to see the "hours" of community service listed as such. I saw a post on this website where someone wrote that they spent X hours in a charity walk/run type thing. Is it better if this takes more time? Maybe s/he was a slow walker/runner. I think it is better to say what you did that shows your contribution. For example, organized charity run; got 10 others to do it also; got N sponsors; raised X dollars. If you work in a soup kitchen or hospital, how do you impact the people. Do you provide needed comfort to the sick or impoverished? Did you organize a food drive, rather than just pass out food in a pantry?</p>
<p>That said, it is hard to organize charity things, but not impossible. Do it because you want to, not because you can check off X hours of community service. I personally started doing community service as a girl scourt a million years ago, and I never stopped. I continued in hs, college, grad school, work, community affairs, and my kid's school now. Show your good character, not some artificial checklist.</p>
<p>just piling up hours is not what colleges look for, nor is there some minimum "cutoff" they expect to see. What they want to see is your impact and leadership. The person who organizes a food drive and gets 30 people to solicit donations from local businesses will look better in the eyes of the adcoms than one of those 30 who signed up as part of his constant search to accumulate volunteer hours (even if he has much more total "volunteer" time).</p>
<p>This isn't standardized or even agreed upon. In fact, in all the applications I filled out, none asked for total CS hours.</p>
<p>i have a question kind of along these lines...i go to an international school in a pretty obscure country, and there's no program like YES or anything here. there are also very few opportunities to volunteer in the community...no animal shelters or libraries or homes for the elderly to volunteer at..</p>
<p>i've done a bit of volunteering at school (like helping set up dances and that kind of thing), a bit in my neighborhood, and i took a trip to a third world county (through Habitat for Humanity) in my junior year where we built houses for poor villagers. I was also a student aide my sophomore year. </p>
<p>Is that going to be passable for volunteer work? (I'm applying to schools like Hopkins, Cornell, Harvard, etc.)</p>
<p>I plan to volunteer during the summer. However, I'm international and not 17 enough, I'm required an adult guardian to supervise me ->> impossible. So I'm looking for other opportunities but its not really optimistic.
Here's my experience after looking at the records of Ivy students: you need to start EC at freshman year, and continue working at the same rate till you get accepted. Volunteering for 300 hours or so during 1-2 summers won't help you MUCH. It just makes your profile look better.</p>
<p>It's what you do that counts. Typically, when you have volunteered 150 hrs, you would have made a big impact, but these days, colleges realize most volunteers don't do much. what colleges really want to see in community service is the impact you made. if you manage to organize an event, even just a little one, it shows character strength and leadership which is alot more impressive than 100 hours. You can also accomplish something big while volunteering, such as inspiring a depressed patient in a hospital or starting a new method of communication between patients / staff. that'll be very impressive since very few volunteers actually make an impact.</p>
<p>Community service is not mandatory or even unofficially mandatory on college applications, even the most competitive. Selective schools tend to accept more "well-lopsided" applicants than well-rounded, so follow your interests! If a passion of yours is community service, that's wonderful, and in that case, I'd say you should have 500+ hours in addition to a particular program or event that you are/were an integral part of (organizing a Relay for Life, working four days a week at a soup kitchen, etc). However, if you aren't particularly interested in service beyond the occasional charity bike ride or whatever, don't even bother putting it down. Colleges won't expect that from you any more than they expect you to be in Science Olympiad or on the track team.</p>