How Indian applicants can overcome low GMAT or GRE test scores to get top school admits - Part 2 | Community or Social Work

This article is 2^nd part of an article series. You may find it useful to read the previous article to get an overall understanding.

If you’re considering education abroad, chances are that you’ve been told that foreign universities value community or social work. This is generally true since it gives them an additional dimension of your personality. I've seen many Indian applicants randomly choose their social volunteering areas. The real question is what community or social work is relevant to YOU? 

Read tips below:

-    Choose areas of social work where you can leverage your professional skills: Let’s say you’re a finance or marketing professional and are considering volunteering to teach underprivileged children. While the volunteering to teach will definitely help, you may find that the NGO will benefit more if you help them organize their cash flows (finance) or develop a communication campaign (marketing). Here, you are using your professional skills to do good. Your professional  skills and experiences are core to your story in school application – showcasing them in a completely different area (like helping NGOs) gives a much better dimension about you to the adcom instead of just saying, “I volunteered to help school children”.

-    Align community work to your goals: Let’s say you want to be an investment banker. I've guided past IB interested applicants to volunteer for various social projects to showcase their IB skills. Two of such many initiatives possible are given below for illustration –

§  Analyzing sources of funds for the NGO and detecting trends/seasonality (analytical skills)

§  Working with the NGO board of directors and helping them make a pitch presentation to secure funding (pitching and presentation skills) etc.

-   Aim for longevity in your social work: Hundreds of times, I’ve seen that social work begins a few months before application deadline. This is a red flag and such initiatives will almost surely not add value to your application. It’s important that you look at areas in community work that you are truly passionate about and have worked at it in the past.

There are many other things one should know about community work besides the above and the applicant should plan such initiatives well to make maximum impact through his/her application. A thorough review of an individual profile is required to guide the correct volunteering/social work initiative. 

For more tips on this or other topics or to get regular updates on new articles, write to me:

sumeet [underscore] verlekar [at the rate] berkeley [dot] edu

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