<p>To do in high school to look good in the application for a top university?</p>
<p>it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to volunteer- its just another EC, treated equal with all others.</p>
<p>It depends on what college you are looking for.</p>
<p>For example, most of the HYPSM require around 450, while other top colleges such as Duke and Alcorn State University only require 449. </p>
<p>Some colleges put put 99% emphasis on the EXACT number of community service hours as well!</p>
<p>Just keep looking, and you are sure to find the right college solely based on community service hours!</p>
<p>Number of volunteer hours is not a relevant indicator to admissions. No university requires any volunteer hours-at least none I know of. And if they did, it would be stated on their application. AnEpicIndian is being sarcastic instead of helpful. Why?</p>
<p>Most colleges hope that their student body is filled with academically strong students who are also good people-with good values. They hope that their graduates will put what has been learned to good use-by helping society in some way. Some students already try to help society by volunteering. At one point colleges could be pretty sure that a student who spent an appreciable amount of time and energy volunteering was a student with good values who was motivated to improve the world. Because they were giving their own time to a cause without any expectation of a payback for their efforts. They were selfless people. That stopped being true when college advisors got wind of the idea that the students with backgrounds in volunteering were more likely to be selected by competitive schools than those who did not volunteer. So they started to advise students to volunteer to get into the competitive colleges. Now all of a sudden choosing those students no longer guaranteed that the student body was filled with well intended students with good values. Instead, selfish students who played the system were more represented in the pool of students with volunteer hours than in the pool without volunteer hours. So colleges went looking for other indicators. As soon as students and private college advisers hired by rich parents get wind of the indicators colleges seek, the variable stops predicting better students and colleges look elsewhere.</p>
<p>@lostaccount - But what if I actually enjoy volunteering? I’ve volunteered at a local soup kitchen for about a year now, way before I started thinking about the college admissions process. I went there to satisfy a high school requirement but I realized that I really liked volunteering there; I’ve met great people and I always feel like I’m helping society and helping my local community. It’s also a very relaxing place to go to and get away from the insanely fast high-school rhythm. If I put all these hours on my college application, are they going to lump me in with the people who, in your words, “played the system”? It isn’t really connected to any of my other ECs, so would it look like I’m just doing it for the sake of my application–should I actually not list it as an activity?</p>
<p>384-481 but no more than 508 or you will get convicted for floggdibbing the willyhooper</p>
<p>
Probably because when someone shows so little understanding of the application evaluation process at “a top university” and in effect announces how little of their own effort they’re willing to put into finding out about the process, then they just don’t seem like they’re going to be a serious candidate.</p>
<p>mikemac, thank you for understanding. </p>
<p>PEOPLE PLEASE UNDERSTAND!!!</p>
<p>Community service is considered a “subjective” category for a reason. It has very little appeal to the readers other than through their own personal feelings, as supposed to the more objective GPA and SAT scores, which contain much, much, much, much, much more value in an application. </p>
<p>You can have 6.8 x 10^(-25) community service hours and a GPA of 3.0.</p>
<p>Guess which one would likely get you rejected from Harvard?</p>
<p>The “right amount” is the amount that you do. Some people do community service as their primary EC and have tons of hours while other people may play sports, spend a lot of time on music, work or do have other primary activities and do minimal community service. The important thing is to have activities you are passionate about be it community service or something else.</p>