The Volunteer Essay
Photo by Brands&People on Unsplash
by Albert Leo
“LOOK COLLEGES, I AM A GOOD PERSON!”
In a world where people can curate their personal image on social media, you can see instances of how people attempt to virtue signal. This is the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions intended to demonstrate one’s good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue.
I use this NPR tote bag, so clearly I’m an environmentally conscious citizen of the world who is better than you plastic bag wielders.
Having gotten to know my Essay Narwhals on a personal level, I can say that they genuinely are generous people. It’s not exactly a surprise that many students, as a means to think of alternative topics other than them being a student, will want to show that generosity through their volunteering.
At first instinct, this feels like a good fit. After all, volunteer activities can show how they can use their free time to make the world a better place.
That being said, are volunteer essays a good choice to write about? Maybe.
Before you commit to writing an essay about your volunteer work, here are some reasons why they aren’t impressive:
1. Most high schools will have community service hour requirements to graduate. So, the fact that you mention that you’re volunteering is really not as unique or impressive as you might think. Most other students will be volunteering, and many of them with the same organizations.
2. You can come across as trying too hard to sound like you’re a good person which can feel disingenuous. Writing an essay that doesn’t adequately tackle the issues of your privilege while using the misfortune of others for your own gain to make you look better could potentially give people the wrong impression.
3. You can often list the volunteer work as part of your extracurricular activities without dedicating a whole essay to it. Students sometimes write about the logistics of the activity rather than the importance of the volunteer work and why it was meaningful to them on a personal level.
With that in mind, I never tell students to not ever write about their volunteer work. If your volunteering fulfills these three qualities, you might have a good essay topic at hand:
1. You have a personal connection to the work. That means you actually know the people that you’re helping out or have some kind of innate desire that makes the work meaningful for you. If you write about the Red Cross and talk about how you helped in a blood drive, that is too obvious. That’s exactly what the Red Cross does, but what does that say about YOU? However, if you’ve personally dealt with bullying, and that allowed you to start conversations with younger kids from your own experiences, that story has more of an impact because it’s personal.
2. You’ve identified a problem within a community and sought out a unique solution. If you’ve created an organization that specifically deals with an issue you’ve personally seen, you stand out from other volunteer essays by showing initiative. And if your solution is also something we’ve never seen, that novelty and creativity will allow you to shine. Doing work because someone else told you to doesn’t diminish the importance of the work. But you might be better off choosing another topic that more uniquely shows off your values and interests.
3. You’ve shown considerable commitment to the work. You don’t want to just talk about something you do once in a while. A one-week trip to Honduras, though maybe a personally profound experience, most likely doesn’t represent your day-to-day life. Not everyone also has resources to spend to be able to go on these trips for the express purposes to humble them. Showing dedication proves that your volunteer work is not just an afterthought or temporary requirement but something that you’ve built and expanded over the course of time because the work is so pivotal to your character and goals.
I’ve had several students that wanted to write about working at a food bank, but you can sort of already know what that essay is going to be about. People are hungry. Helping people be fed makes me feel better.
Which again, is not to say working at a food bank is bad, it’s just not that interesting. Doing a repetitive low-skill task without much interaction with other people, and without being able to express your intelligence or personality doesn’t highlight anything special about you. You sound like you’d make a good robot– one with a heart, but still a robot. This is especially true if you write in a cheesy manner that shows you didn’t even enjoy the experience. (e.g. “Bagging all the canned goods was monotonous, but at the end of the day, I felt like I made a difference.”)
My Essay Narwhals have done and continue to do amazing service that constantly opens my heart, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the focus of your essays. Do good, but sometimes, the act in itself is the reward. But fret not, you will still get credit for your good deeds in the extracurricular portion of the app!
