Volunteering

When exactly did Volunteering become the next necessity for college?

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t want to help people it’s just that I’m very busy as it is, and would rather not be forced to volunteer just to receive grants and the like for college. Being a top academic student of today means taking advanced placement courses. Advanced placement courses mean work. Work means a lot of homework in order to improve your skills. Getting the grade means getting into the school of your choice. Getting into school period requires money. Money is obtained from wealthy parents or a part-time job. Part-time jobs mean another time constraint. Now if you’re wealthy you probably have enough time to volunteer and are probably wondering why this entry is even relevant. But, if you’re like me, you’re probably nodding your head in agreement. Now, if there were a way to volunteer instead of meeting your time constraints all would be well and good and we would have unicorns, faeries, and no money would be necessary (meaning that volunteer work would be more or less unnecessary too).

However there isn’t so what gets cut? My precious next-to-non-existent free time. Now, having some free time to pursue interests is good because it makes you happy and able to cope with the time spend unable to pursue your interests. Although, volunteering makes you feel good about yourself as a person, work is work, and by the end of the day you’ll probably have more aches and pains than anything else to show for your work. But you’ll get that piece of paper that promises you helped sandbag the neighborhood which will eventually help you get into college. Hopefully you’ve also managed to accumulate money and a decent grade to get you there too. If you have that’s great and you’re scot-free until they ask you one tiny question:

“What’s your major?”

That’s when you realize, you don’t know what your interests are anymore (aside from getting into college to get a good job). You never had any time to pursue them! So you don’t know much about yourself because instead of living your life, you were out there volunteering, working, and doing your homework.

So I say, volunteer as little as possible in high school, and probably college too. Wait until you’ve got your bank and your life established before you try to improve others too much. That’s the perfect time to volunteer, you’ve got more time, and more money to dedicate to doing so. So quit forcing us to be even more stressed out and let us be ourselves. If we really want to help the community, (which most of us probably will) we’ll do it when it’s best for us.