I need to do some volunteer work or EC’s to put on my college application. I am a Sociology major, and I don’t know what I should be looking for? Any recommendation from other social science majors? I know that it helps if it’s related to your major. I’ve been doing some food pantry volunteering here and there and I used to distribute packs of food to the homeless downtown, but is there anything else I should be looking for? Any recommendations?
no you don’t. Colleges care that you have the fundamentals to learn and be in society. How about a paying job instead?
No one NEEDS vol hours. No college requires them.
I already have a job.
“I need to do some volunteer work or EC’s to put on my college application.”
To reiterate @T26E4, no you don’t. Just do activities you enjoy.
You’re simply overestimating the fact that colleges care that much about your choice of EC. The fact that you’ve held a job is singly one of the BEST ECs available. Remember, colleges want ppl with org skills and discipline to take advantage of their academic and social offerings – not a cruise director or tour guide or restaurant shift manager.
This doesn’t happen: “Hmm… Erica here wants to be a PoliSci major – I see she was on the robotics team and worked at a nursing home. Reject. No political work in her background!”
Yes, and I enjoy doing volunteer work on top of my job and would like suggestions from other sociology or psychology majors who did other volunteer work that isn’t doing hotline volunteering. I would like to have more experience volunteering and doing more that’s major related. I’m not asking because I’m afraid my application will get rejected.
That’s what I’m asking. Telling me to get a job, isn’t helpful, especially since I already have one.
“Get a job” is a recommendation. It might not be what you want to hear, but it’s one nevertheless.
The thing with sociology is that it doesn’t have a clear career trajectory. It’s easy to tell biology majors to get research experience, or suggest that an English major work for a school literary magazine. But sociology is such a broad field. Any number of things could relate back to it. What do you want to do with a sociology degree? What extracurriculars demonstrate your potential future plans?
(Or, in other words, just do something you’re passionate about. Demonstrate commitment and care, and with a bit of creativity, you can probably relate it to sociology.)
My son ended up doing a project archiving the neighborhood association papers. It was mostly scanning and making pdfs, but they were indexing them at the same time so he learned a lot of neighborhood history. He ended up writing about it for one of his essays.
Our library runs a program that collects oral histories of older residents. I interviewed a pair of African-American women who were the first to integrate our neighborhood back in the 1950s. I was given some training so that I would ask questions they wanted collected like what games they played as kids, and where they went to school, but we ended up talking for an over an hour. It was fascinating.
Rather than taking the OP to task on here, which is really not very helpful overall, please report rude behavior. Appropriate warnings can then be given, as they have in this case to the OP.