Volunteering: Community or Competition?
With college admission requirements ever-growing, students face the unique challenge of upping their amount of volunteer hours.
Do students truly understand the power they hold in making a difference? Or are they merely concerned with the number of hours they acquire?
April 29, 2014
Volunteering gives people the opportunity to make connections that last a lifetime while allowing one to make a difference within their community and within themselves. Volunteering has long been an esteemed and valuable aspect of the community and because of this, it has always been a desirable component on college applications. But when such a thing is expected for high school students, there’s a possibility for it to lose its sacred value.
There are many students at Panther Creek who are active volunteers. For example, junior Henry Lai, who tutors kids at Cedar Fork Elementary, says “Tutoring young elementary students is not an easy thing, and I don’t think anyone would do it if they were just looking for the hours.” Lai says that he enjoys helping kids and would do so even if it wasn’t an expectation for college admissions.
Another active volunteer, junior Rohan Manathkar, is a regular volunteer at the Kramden Institute, a volunteer organization that refurbishes old computers and gives them to under-privileged students. Manathkar admits that even though he is interested in technology, he still volunteers merely for the hours.
Nowadays, it’s common for students to have volunteered for more than fifty hours in their entire high school career, and that being the norm means that students are just focusing on the amount of hours they’re getting done, and less on the quality of service.
— Rohan Manathkar
This raises the question as to whether or not students have begun volunteering just for the hours, and in doing so, forgetting the importance of volunteering and making a difference in the community?
College and volunteering have a very close relationship, and that relationship has become more intimate as the years go by. Panther Creek students have pointed out the potential dangers of this. “I don’t think [volunteering and college] should be related, because a lot of people only do it for college,” says junior Amari Carethers, “so they shouldn’t make it a sign of good character.” Junior Victor Eduardo agrees,
I think placing material expectations, in this case volunteer hours, makes people do it for the wrong reasons. It also makes them competitive and forces them to forget the importance of volunteering.
— Victor Eduardo
There’s no denying that volunteering has become the new trend the past couple of years. Because it has grown to be so common, is there a possibility of it no longer being exceptional on a college application? The entire point of volunteering is to give people your best effort and expect nothing in return. This idea has been severely altered by the expectations of college and the compensation of volunteers with acceptances and scholarships.
Volunteering has always been a fundamental part of society, yet it now faces the pressure of being torn away by the standardized expectations of colleges, and also by the students who are driven to meet these standards. Although expecting students to volunteer will encourage them to do positive deeds for the community, it will also bring students to fight for the hours and not care about the quality of their work. If we allow this increasingly corrupt tradition to continue, we’ll keep getting closer to the day when we ask ourselves, “what’s the point of volunteering?”
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