Some people dedicate a portion of their time to help others in need. This could be cleaning up the highway or volunteering at Bernie’s Book Bank; however, people – especially students – can have different motivations than what someone may expect. So what does volunteering mean to students?
Most students volunteer because they believe performing service will look good on their college application and thus increases their chances of being accepted into a college. A lot of the time, students have no interest in performing service or expect to be rewarded with service hours to put on their college application when they do. Some students go as far as to start a fundraiser only to ditch it after getting into college.
Students should be doing service but not for volunteering hours. Instead, students should do service only if they genuinely care about the cause. Otherwise, they might find themselves being exhausted and bored which might affect the other volunteers around them.
This mindset applies to many in the community as a whole and can’t be simply switched. However, we can modify it slightly by informing students of their impact because students may not realize the impact that volunteering has on other people.
Students may not have time to learn about real world issues. This could be because of the amount of time spent on homework such as in high-level classes, like honors and APs, that tend to assign lots of homework which students often get caught up in. Therefore, students may not understand the importance of service because they may not have time to learn more about the world around them.
At LHS, students may take what they have for granted without being fully educated on problems occuring around the world. When this is paired with the fact that students do not have much free time, we get a generation of students who are very much unaware of the outside world and likely get less opportunities to use the critical thinking skills schools teach them.
While it is not the school’s responsibility to ensure students keep up with real world events, it would be beneficial to ensure students have some time to explore the current issues in the world and obtain knowledge of issues around the world. One way students can learn about problems in our world is through Current Issues, a class that teaches students about recent events that have occurred in the world. Students could choose to take such classes here at school that educate them about current issues in an attempt to keep up with the world and understand what issues are present.
But while students may not even know what issues are occurring in the world, they may not know of service opportunities that they can participate in. A solution could be for high schools to inform students of opportunities to volunteer, students who do not like volunteering require some sort of encouragement to at least consider the good they are doing for other people. Volunteering can mean many different things to students. However; students need to stop looking at volunteering as another way to get into college.
Students may lack the ability to see how they are performing an impact on other people due to the fact that they do not even have time to do so. In addition, students may treat service as another thing to put on their college application through the form of volunteering hours. These ideas reflect an unhealthy attitude towards service. Service is a choice, it is not a prerequisite to enter a college. Do not force yourself to do work that will eventually bring dissatisfaction as well as not helping you advance into your dream career, it is mainly for people who want to help others somewhere else in the world.
Only do service if you truly want to help others – and if you still believe volunteering hours are needed for college, at least realize there is more to service and volunteering aside from what you can receive.
