Don’t write about volunteering – unless you do.

When I ask my students about their high school activities, almost every one of them mentions some kind of volunteering. Maybe it was a mission trip. Maybe it was a week building something abroad, or tutoring at a community center, or serving meals at a shelter on weekends. Volunteering has become an essential part of the high school experience—often literally required for graduation.  It’s not surprising that it’s a very common application essay topic.

Common isn't automatically bad. But it does mean two things are working against you: you're competing with thousands of similar stories, and admissions readers have seen the predictable versions so many times they can spot them in the first paragraph.

Here's the thing nobody tells you up front: most volunteering essays fail not because the experience wasn't meaningful, but because of how they're told.

The Four Ways This Essay Goes Wrong

1. The savior narrative. This is the essay where the student is, however unintentionally, the hero who arrives to help the less fortunate. Students don’t say this directly, rather they say things like, “I wanted to give back," "I wanted to make a difference in their lives.”  

2. The "appreciate what I have" pivot. This is the clichéd idea that: seeing how they live made me realize how lucky I am. It's understandable as a real emotional reaction. It is also, almost without exception, overused.  It can also, inadvertently, come off wrong when a teenager makes too big a claim about changing someone else’s life.

3. The “They had so little but were so happy” line.  This is a close cousin of the gratitude pivot, but it's worse, because it's not a claim about the writer.  It's a verdict on someone else's inner life, delivered after a week of observing them. The logic underneath it is uncomfortable once you spell it out: they don't seem to need what I have, so the gap between us must be fine. If your essay includes any version of this — "you could see how happy they were despite," "they had nothing, but the joy in that village" — cut it. It's not insight. It's a tidy excuse not to think harder about the asymmetry you just witnessed.

3. Pay-to-play suspicion. Many mission trips and volunteer abroad programs are essentially purchased experiences—a family pays a fee, the student is flown somewhere for a week, and a "service" experience is delivered. This can absolutely be a valuable experience, but you’ll need to show what you were responsible for and how you learned something distinctive about yourself as a result.

So when can you write about volunteering?

Sometimes volunteer work really is one of the most defining things a student has done—not because it looks good, but because it's where they spent real time, ran into real problems, and grew in some way meaningful way. The question isn't should I write about volunteering. It's do I have the material that makes this essay different from the thousand other volunteering essays a reader will see this cycle.

Here the reality: in most volunteer experiences, you show up, you're assigned a task, you do the task—the same task everyone else there is doing. There's nothing wrong with that; plenty of valuable service works exactly this way. But it does mean that the basic material for your essay is exactly the same as many other students.

That's not a reason to abandon the topic. It's a reason to look harder at whether there's something more to your story—a conflict you faced, a realization, a piece of responsibility you took on that wasn't assigned to you.

If a hundred other applicants did something similar, the differentiator isn't the activity—it's the way you think about it. Has anyone else noticed what you noticed? Would your best friend, who did the same trip, write the same essay? If yes, you haven't found your angle yet.

Often, the best volunteering essays aren’t really about volunteering at all – see the two examples below:

Mission trip/building project:
Don’t use:  We built wells in a village in Peru. I was struck by how happy the people were even though they had so little. I would never complain about not getting a new iPhone again.

Better: I went to Peru expecting to feel good about helping people. I quickly learned that my contribution to manual labor was sadly limited by my lack of coordination. So, I updated all their apps, reorganized their hard drive, and showed them how to use WhatsApp. It was humbling to give up on building wells, but I realized that being part of a team doesn’t mean doing what everyone else is doing – it just means doing something. (Key insight: the conclusion doesn’t only apply to volunteering. It’s a takeaway that can define how you live your life.)

ESL conversation partner

Don’t use: Watching her English improve over the semester was incredibly rewarding.

Better: I went in hoping to feel good about helping someone. I didn’t expect to see my English improve as much as hers.  I had never thought about why we speak the way we do, and it changed how I thought about language.  (Key insight: this version isn’t really about volunteering. The volunteering is an occasion to notice something else.)

The rule is not don’t write about volunteering. It’s don’t write only about volunteering.

The volunteering essays that work aren't really essays about volunteering. The trip, the tutoring, the shift at the shelter — that's just where the writer happened to be standing when they became aware of something else. Your essay should be about that “something else.”