<p>THe colleges will assume that you’re telling the truth unless other aspects of your application don’t add up. However, don’t expect the fact that you did volunteer work abroad to add extra weight to your application unless you did something extraordinary like earn the money to travel abroad to volunteer.</p>
<p>Colleges also know that most of the abroad service experience occur because parents have the money to send students on expensive service trips or because the parents line up the students to do service with friends and relatives in the parents’ home countries.</p>
<p>As a result, it can be far more impressive when students create and organize service projects in their own hometowns. More than likely, they’ll have to do far more work setting those up, and they’ll have to solve far more challenges than do the students whose parents pay for service experiences for them. </p>
<p>I have found it very typical for immigrant students as well as Jewish students who apply to Harvard to have done some kind of service abroad. The Jewish students often have done service in Israel. The immigrant students or offspring of immigrants have done it in their parents’ home countries.
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