Community Service: Creative Ways to do What You Love
By Path Mentor D.S., a recent graduate from Columbia University majored in Biomedical Engineering • Columbia Egleston Scholar (Originally Posted on September 20, 2019)
Community service is a great way to help others and improve your local community. It can be an avenue to build on or develop new skills, feel great about your contributions, and develop interests and passions into tangible results. From a college-admissions perspective, admissions officers want to see that you take deep dives into your interests (that relevantly have a community service aspect) and are able to create an impact in your community and even beyond. Today, we’ll talk about how you should go about thinking about your community service.
First things first, figure out what you are interested in or passionate about. Remember to make a list that is specific to yourself. After, you should see what is currently available off the top of your head or through organizations that you are already in. This gives you an easy look at what you can prioritize for further steps.
Second, you should see how you can work in and further develop this passion and its impact. For example, if an available service project is only done once a year, you can start to look at how you can continue the community service past that once a year project. For example, you might be able to expand more events that do very similar service with different communities (e.g. at your library, religious center, or school). This would allow you to also develop your leadership skills under the guise of an already established organization. If there is nothing that exists in your community as your proposed service project, you can look to see if other examples of it have been done in other locations. Communication with the group that does that might give you insights on how you can bring it to your location.
Third, you should see how you can incorporate your service both in expanding your skill-set or developing your story. For example, your service project should usually involve collaboration with diverse groups as well as working on ethical and emotional awareness of the situation. This makes you a better person and lets admissions committees know that you work well with everyone - thus making you a more attractive candidate. You should also look at how to ensure that the service becomes sustainable (if it is not) or how the service can help address the root of the problem which you are trying to address. This helps you develop your skills in evaluating the entirety of the problem and the cause-and-effects that each circumstance has.
Now that we have looked at how to think about what community service to do, here are some examples of good types of projects or organizations:
Other Students
Mentorship programs
Teaching/Coaching
School-Related
Fundraising for charitable causes
School-beautification efforts
Community-Related
Community beautification
Environmental activities (e.g. planting trees)
Organizing park/beach cleaning (e.g. trash-pickup)
Animal-Related
Setting up dog-walk volunteering
Volunteering at animal shelters or veterinarian’s office
Homeless or Economically Disadvantaged
Volunteering babysitting services
Volunteering at a food bank or soup kitchen
Medical-Related
Volunteering at a hospital
Volunteering at a nursing home
Art-related
Volunteering at a museum
Collaborating art activities for local beautification
Look into local (or start) already established organizations:
Amnesty International
Key Club
Operation Smile
Special Olympics
Habitat for Humanity
Students Against Destructive Decisions
Race for the Cure
Red Cross
Be the Match Registry
Project Linus (knitting blankets)
org
Relay for Life
The list goes on, and while you can go and google examples of things to do, here at ElitesPath, we will help you figure out what is best and work with you to make sure that your project is successful.
