Reading 39
The altruistic edge
Students find that it's good to give if they're looking for an advantage in getting accepted at the
upper-tier college of their choice.
Linda Shrieves
Sentinel Staff Writer
November 17, 2005
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 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," says 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," says 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," says 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," says 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. But they don't need to,
she says.
"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."
Student: Don't be 'naive'
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," says
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.
Anna Aleksandrova fears that her 4.59 grade-point average at Lake Brantley won't be enough to get her
into Harvard or Yale, so she's hoping her volunteer projects will get her noticed