Community service

Few things piss me off more than college applications. I don't think a standardized test score is a good indicator of what kind of person you are, and I definitely don't think the fact that your parents forced you to play piano means you deserve to go to Yale. The insane emphasis on test scores infuriates me, but nowhere near the level of community service in regards to college applications.

There's this awful, awful website about college, called collegeconfidential.com. It's where thousands of so-called "high-acheiving" students gather to fret about if they've kissed enough ass to get into one of the 20 or so colleges in the entire country they deem "good enough." A typical post is something like "I have a 4.0 GPA, 2340 SAT, and 200 hours of community service, will I get in to Brown?"

Ignoring the GPA and test score, what a stupid way to measure community service! Hours? Really? Couldn't you measure community service in the number of people you helped, or the good you did? I overheard (eavesdropped on) a kid in the mall talking about community service the other day, and how he need more hours. Why? Why is he not talking about needing to do more good? Help more people, make more of a difference!

So who gets community service hours? The kid who chases soccer balls down during games? Or the girl who organizes a clothing drive in the middle of winter? The sad answer is that often, it's the first. You can quantify the amount of time spent on a soccer field, but not so much in "organizing." It's, for lack of a better word, bullshit.

Back to our Brown hopeful on collegeconfidential. I guarantee this hypothetical person that I totally made up worked hard for those 200 hours of community service, and made a positive difference in their community. She might have worked at a battered women's shelter, or maybe spent time working with the big brother/ big sister program. Maybe she stayed up until 2 A.M. working the graveyard shift on a suicide hotline, or maybe she delivered meals on thanksgiving. Aren't saying all those things a better way of measuring her impact? Wouldn't it be SO much more meaningful to mention the families who got to enjoy thanksgiving because of her, or the ONE person she got to maybe rethink killing themselves.

It's even kinda insulting to think that that kind of impact can be boiled down to a certain number of hours, a specific amount of time in which you decided to be helpful. It doesn't count the effects of your service, which is really the important part. I feel like when deciding how worthwhile or meaningful community service is, the results are way more important than the amount of time put in. Time doesn't even always equal effort.

But I'm getting myself worked up and it's 3:29 in the morning. I gotta get to bed earlier...