Many high schools put a strong emphasis on community service and encourage their students to participate in campus-wide events to serve those in need. However, the purpose of community service is to understand how we, as high schoolers, can do our part and make our community better. Many students, especially in Asian countries, think they must do impressive large-scale projects–traveling to different cities and countries–so they can add these experiences to their college application and impress admissions officers. Sorry to break the news, but let me tell you why this could potentially jeopardize your chance of getting into your dream schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That being said, the last thing you should do is flying all the way to a rural village in Vietnam just to build houses for a week and leave. This experience could appear impressive on paper, but what admissions officers see is that you only<\/p>\n\n\n\n A better community service experience would be helping an organization in your local community over the a long period. It\u2019s okay if your contribution is as simple as volunteering at events because what colleges care about is your ability to contribute throughout a long period. For instance, I joined a club where we would head down to an elementary school twice a week to tutor students for an hour. It\u2019s certainly not as impressive as building a house, but I did it for 3 years, that\u2019s more than 200 hours total!<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the other hand, volunteering can be community service but doesn\u2019t have to be. Volunteering can be broadly defined as spending something you have (i.e. time and attention) without receiving money or other forms of compensation in return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ultimately, the type of community service doesn\u2019t matter. Colleges are about you and your characters. When you fill out you college app, try to answer the following questions: What have you learned from these community service experiences? What specific incidents shaped your values and personality? How will you continue to influence others with things you\u2019ve learned?<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many high schools put a strong emphasis on community service and encourage their students to participate in campus-wide events to serve those in need. However, the purpose of community service is to understand how we, as high schoolers, can do our part and make our community better. Many students, especially in Asian countries, think they must do impressive large-scale projects–traveling to different cities and countries–so they can add these experiences to their college application and impress admissions officers. Sorry to break the news, but let me tell you why this could potentially jeopardize your chance of getting into your dream schools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11895,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"Many high schools put a strong emphasis on community service and encourage their students to participate in campus-wide events to serve those in need. However, the purpose of community service is to understand how we, as high schoolers, can do our part and make our community better. Many students, especially in Asian countries, think they must do impressive large-scale projects--traveling to different cities and countries--so they can add these experiences to their college application and impress admissions officers. Sorry to break the news, but let me tell you why this could potentially jeopardize your chance of getting into your dream schools.","_seopress_robots_index":"","is_share_social_media":0,"is_publish_medium":0,"language":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2289,2400],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-extracurricular-activities-en","category-high-school-en"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blog.ivy-way.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/volunteer-1326758_1280.png","views":{"total":97,"cached_at":"","cached_date":1776361122},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.ivy-way.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.ivy-way.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.ivy-way.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ivy-way.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ivy-way.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ivy-way.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ivy-way.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.ivy-way.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ivy-way.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.ivy-way.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
YOUR Community<\/strong>
According to Merriam-Webster, \u201ccommunity\u201d is defined as either a) the people with common interests living in a particular area, or b) a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together. The keyword here is \u201ctogether,\u201d meaning you should start from helping your own community, those who share the same interests or qualities at the same place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Long Term Effort<\/strong>
Using the village example again, another bad thing about it is that you only committed a short period of time to this project. You flew over, built houses, helped the locals, and that\u2019s it. What next? Have you actually started planning you next trip back\u2014as opposed to writing \u201cI wish I\u2019ll come back again\u201d in your essay? What colleges see is that your effort is unsustainable because you\u2019re giving the villagers a fish rather than teaching them how to fish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Community Service vs. Volunteering<\/strong>
This is a clarification because a lot of people confuse these two terms. First of all, community service doesn\u2019t have to be volunteering; it can be paid services as long as the community is benefitted through your assistance. Community service means helping others that may need your help, so if you are capable of doing that, it counts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n