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Are you currently applying to college and are wondering how to discuss your volunteering experience on your applications? With such a wide range of volunteering opportunities that students participate in, it can be difficult to decide what to highlight on your application. This post is here to help guide you through the process of discussing volunteering on your college applications so you can submit a compelling application.
Volunteering on College Applications
If you want to highlight your volunteer experience on your college applications, you should aim to have anywhere between 50-200 hours, which is usually the range colleges look for as it shows in-depth commitment. You should also aim to discuss experiences that you participated in consistently over a long period of time.
Places You Can Volunteer At
Hospitals/Clinics
Homeless shelters
Soup kitchens
Animal shelters
Women's/children's centres
Refugee centres
Food banks
Best Buddies
Big Brother/Big Sister programs
Local farms
Community gardens
Libraries
Museums
Volunteering Dos
Choose meaningful experiences: Talk about experiences where you were able to make a significant impact on the community in which you volunteered. This could be volunteering for a cause you are passionate about, or simply something that you volunteered in for an extended period of time. The longer you have volunteered for a particular cause, the more likely you are to be passionate about it, which will reflect in your application.
Be specific: Discuss the details of what you did as part of this activity. Do not just simply state all your volunteer experiences as a list - provide an explanation for each volunteering experience. This could include your responsibilities as part of this role, how you helped others, what you learned, any leadership roles you took on, etc.
Quantify achievements: Where possible, you should provide numerical values to help quantify your achievements. For example, instead of simply stating you organized a fundraiser to help raise money for a local animal shelter, you could say you organized a fundraiser over 2 months which raised $1000 for an animal shelter.
Show personal growth: You should discuss how you grew as a person as a result of partaking in this volunteering experience. What new skills did you learn? What lessons did you learn from other volunteers or people in the communities you helped? How will you use these skills in future?
Highlight leadership: You should discuss roles in which you took an active lead in the volunteering process. For example, if you went from a general volunteer in your freshman year to a more specialized role by the time you reached senior year, this will be more impressive to admissions officers than if you consistently stayed in a low-level position throughout high school.
Show diverse experiences: Highlight a range of different volunteering experiences to show diversity in the skills you've gained and people you've met. Explain how each of these experiences has shaped you and prepared you for the future.
Volunteering Don'ts
Don't be vague: You should avoid making general statements such as saying "I helped people" or "I made an impact in this community". Instead, your narrative should be descriptive and paint an accurate picture of your role. Provide descriptive anecdotes to bring your experiences to life.
Don't exaggerate: It is important to note that even though you may have a large range of volunteering experiences, you may not have participated in all of them in equal depth, which is okay! However, you should make sure not to exaggerate your volunteer experiences when you describe them as admissions officers can often spot when descriptions are not genuine. Even if you only volunteered at a place/community a few times, describe those experiences as honestly as you can.
Don't include irrelevant activities: Focus on talking about activities that were meaningful to you or that helped you gain skills that you can use in your future studies at college. Don't include one-off volunteering experiences just for the sake of making your list longer as you will not be able to show meaningful growth and connections for volunteering experiences that you didn't engage deeply in.
Don't leave out challenges: While it may seem tempting to discuss only the positive aspects of volunteering, you should aim to talk about the challenges as well. This shows admissions officers your resilience and perseverance, which are good qualities to have on a college application.
We hope this guide has helped you identify how to discuss volunteering on college applications. Good luck with everything!
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