Community Service - is 100 hours enough?

mumbai98
Fri, 19 Jun 2015 14:38:56 +0000

@biobabe101 If you look at community service purely from a numerical point of view, you are looking at community service the wrong way.

It isn’t the number of hours that matter, but it is the quality of work, the result of what you put in that matters. If you can bring about a positive change in your community in even a 100 hours, college will not look down on it.

I for one, started an organisation a few years back related to a cause that I deeply value. I may have logged in only 500 or 600 hours throughout the course of the years, but I was able to help people in a few countries, let alone a lot of cities in my own country. On the other hand, I have friends who do community service just for the heck of it. They just go to a random place a few days a week, volunteer for a few hours, come home and forget everything about it. They have logged in hours that make the number of hours that I have worked a very small number.

It is up to you to decide who would have done community service that actually matters (and for your sake, the one that ‘looks better when it comes to college applications’.)

Personally, I do not hold very high regard for community service that is done just for college applications. I believe that people can and have gotten into top colleges with 0 hours of community service. That is completely normal for a person who is not interested in doing community service. Why should we force him/her to do something that he/she does not want to do?

It is not the amount of work that you do but what you make out of the work that you do that matters