Fox Chapel Area High School
Senior? Yes
Elite top 100? Yes
Letters of recommendation: Letter of Recommendation 1, Letter of Recommendation 2
Since elementary school, when I volunteered for the Pittsburgh Community Food Bank for the first time, I haven’t been able to imagine my life without the joy of giving back to my community. Nothing brings quite the same feeling of sheer happiness as doing something kind for someone else. I have found that some of my life’s most touching moments have been through my volunteering experiences, and the people that I encounter during them. Sometimes a moment as simple as seeing someone’s face light up after they receive food is enough to be memorable. Volunteerism has also given me the honor to establish long term relationships with others that have made me a better person, and have taught me valuable lessons about what it means to be a human being and a citizen. To me, volunteerism hasn’t been about receiving the hours, the scholarship, or the recognition. Volunteerism has been about receiving the simple sense of gratification that comes with doing something selfless.
Determining how my volunteerism has affected my life is difficult, since I have only gone a small part of my life without volunteering, but I do know that volunteerism has brought me many valuable experiences that have been integral to my development as a person. To say that volunteerism has had a positive effect on me would be an understatement. Volunteering has continually brought me a sense of accomplishment and happiness that is difficult to duplicate in other activities, and has made me a more confident person with more of a desire to lead others, especially in volunteer projects. I also think that volunteerism has helped me develop an understanding of those who are different from me, such as people experiencing homelessness, incarceration, food insecurity, or who have far fewer privileges in life than I have been given. Having an understanding of those who are different from us is imperative to navigating the world as an adult. From every day interatctions with others to making decisions as voters, empathy is a vital trait to have.
It would also be difficult to determine how my volunteerism has affected those around me, but my hope is that I have positively affected others’ lives, at least in the short term, and that maybe others have been inspired to try volunteerism because of me and the evident happiness that volunteering has brought me. I cannot guarantee that I have affected others as much as I hope, but my assumption is the more you volunteer, the higher the chance that you will touch someone else. This idea is enough to motivate me to volunteer for as long as I possibly can.
In the years to come, in college and beyond, I hope to continue volunteering as much as I can, always pursuing the sense that volunteerism gives me- the sense that I have done something that someone else appreciates, and the sense that I am making a small but positive difference in the world.