When you’re an upperclassman and college applications begin peeking up on the horizon, you might look at your extracurriculars and realize that you haven’t quite reached your potential. You might worry that colleges will see your short list of random activities and think that you’re a lazy bum who doesn’t care about your community.
That’s when the motivation kicks in.
Like clockwork, college-bound juniors and seniors start organizing community groups, stepping up as leaders, and volunteering at every opportunity. These are good things, but authenticity comes into question here; can these services really be absolved of selfishness when students have so much to gain personally?
As a senior in 2025, I know that acceptance rates for top colleges have never been lower and that overall applications have never been more gamified. People have discovered that there’s a strategy you can follow to win, and part of that winning strategy is having community work on your resume.
But if a student feeds the hungry just so they can write about being selfless in their personal statement essay, should they really be allowed to benefit personally from it? It’s nearly impossible to prove any motives, but it feels wrong to write that down as a good deed—“I’m doing this for you” is very different from “I’m doing this for me and you.”
Judging whether certain acts are labors of love or just a means to an end is hard, but in the end does it really matter? Ulterior motives or not, community work is still getting done and a motivated student is still getting into college. You can be bothered by the murky principles involved, but it’s hard to argue with positive results.
Of course extracurriculars and community work are important to list in any college application, but it’s wiser for students to choose activities that align with their personal interests rather than doing chores just to check a box—to do something they’ll care about in 5 years rather than something they’d abandon a few months later.
