ORLANDO, Fla. - Anna Aleksandrova can't
recall all the hours she has spent volunteering during the past four
years.
She tutors students, judges middle-school science fairs and has
spent her summers volunteering at the Orlando Science Center. As
president of two service organizations, she sings Christmas carols
at a retirement home and organizes parties for a Boys and Girls
Club. But her favorite volunteer activity, she says, is returning to
Teague Middle School in Altamonte Springs, Fla., to help the
teachers who taught her English when she came here from Russia in
seventh grade.
Aleksandrova, who has a 4.59 grade-point average at Lake Brantley
High School, is applying to Harvard, Yale, Emory and Northeastern
universities. She's banking on her grades and test scores to get her
into one of those elite schools, but she knows volunteerism could
give her an edge.
"It's something I do because I want to, not because I want
attention," said Aleksandrova, 18. "But I'd like people to notice
that I did do something above and beyond the norm."
Eager to gain entry to the nation's elite colleges, many
high-school students are taking mission trips abroad, volunteering
as research assistants and starting their own nonprofits - hoping
these activities will open doors in the competitive world of college
admissions.
More than 82 percent of high-school seniors performed volunteer
work last year, according to the 2004 American Freshman survey, a
national poll conducted by the University of California, Los
Angeles. That's up from 74 percent a decade earlier and 66 percent
in 1989.
Although college admissions officers discourage students from
listing every canned-food drive they've led, many high-school
juniors and seniors wonder how they can stand out from all the other
students who are working at food banks, building houses for the poor
and mowing yards for senior citizens.
Many of them are genuinely altruistic, of course, but some
students and advisers view the college-admissions quest as a game of
charitable one-upsmanship.
"The colleges are rewarding uniqueness," said Steven Roy Goodman,
an educational consultant in Washington, D.C. "The students are
simply responding to what the colleges are asking for."
College officials insist they don't want students to pad resumes,
but Goodman says the country's selective colleges have established a
pattern of admitting supervolunteers.
Students' attempts to fit that mold can appear desperate or
calculating. Some figure out the hot-button issue on the campus of
their choice - whether it's gay rights or the anti-war movement -
and then volunteer at an AIDS hospice or a peace organization in
their hometowns.
"Here's the conversation that takes place 10,000 times a week in
America," said Mark Sklarow, executive director of Independent
Education Consultants Association. "A kid says, `I just heard from
my school counselor that, even though I have a 4.0 GPA and am in the
95th percentile on the SAT, unless I can show some way to stand out,
I might not get into the college I want.'"
The parents and student then frantically search for a stellar
volunteer activity - preferably one that can be accomplished in six
months or less.
"Here they are, as a 17-year-old, needing to prove there's
another side to them," said Sklarow. "They say, `Well, here's
something we can do. Let's go build a school in Costa Rica.'"
Some parents and students do go overboard, says Carol McAlpin of
Winter Park, Fla. But they don't need to, she said.
"I've been to a lot of these schools and heard their admissions
spiels," says McAlpin, whose daughter attends Princeton and whose
son is at Yale. "They say, `Don't fill your resume with a ton of
stuff just to make you look good.' They're looking for authenticity,
the things you love doing."
Maybe so, but when Chadd Clark was attending Trinity Preparatory
School in Winter Park, he and his classmates were keenly aware of
the emphasis colleges put on volunteerism.
"A lot of us did things big and small with the intention of
putting it down on the resume," says Clark, 21, now a junior at
Georgetown University. "I don't want that to sound cynical, but it's
naive to disregard that. You're very aware of what's expected of
you, and you look for avenues to fulfill that."
Clark scored a 1570 on the SAT, earned a 4.0 GPA and was
co-valedictorian at his school. But he wasn't sure that would be
enough to get him into Harvard, Princeton or Yale. So he tutored
kids, co-taught a religious-education class at his church and
created a Wall of Hope project after Sept. 11, 2001, a mural that
was displayed at the Pentagon.
He was accepted at Johns Hopkins, Georgetown and Notre Dame
universities.
One of his Trinity classmates, Mia Rommel, compiled an impressive
list of volunteer activities. But she was deflated at one college
fair when she overheard a classmate describing a mission trip to
South America, where she helped a team perform cleft-palate
surgery.
"I think her dad was a doctor or a neighbor was a doctor, so
she'd gone on the trip to help out," said Rommel, who now attends
George Washington University. "But I'll never forget it. She was
talking to one of the college admission officers, and I thought, `Oh
great. How am I going to compete with that?'"
But does it really work?
Once they've been admitted to college, many students are never
sure what got them in - their grades, the interview or impressive
volunteer work.
Glenford Samuels' counselors at Olympia High School in Orlando
urged him to earn plenty of volunteer hours so he could secure a
Bright Futures scholarship, which requires 75 hours of service.
Samuels volunteered more than that, though, because he wanted to.
Yet, when he was interviewing at colleges, "I didn't really get much
feedback," says Samuels, 18, a freshman on full scholarship at the
University of Central Florida.
Now Samuels has cut back, volunteering occasionally at the campus
radio station while he juggles a double major.
But on some campuses, kids keep on volunteering - with an eye on
grad school.
Chris Elrod arrived at Yale four years ago and found himself
surrounded by resume builders who create their own charitable
organizations, from cancer-awareness clubs to organizations that
help low-income families. "It's almost excessive," says Elrod, a
history major who graduated from Edgewater High School's magnet
program. "Volunteer work is great, but a lot of these kids aren't
doing it for charity's sake. ... They think that they have to have
started something or otherwise their college careers will be deemed
a waste of time."
But Elrod, 21, who caught the eye of Ivy League colleges by
rowing crew, admits he's not in a position to criticize.
This year, he and some friends started a magazine called the Yale
Economic
Review.
