ORLANDO, Fla. â€" Anna Aleksandrova can't recall all the hours she has spent volunteering during the past four years.
She tutors students, judges middle-school science fairs and has spent her summers volunteering at the Orlando Science Center. As president of two service organizations, she sings Christmas carols at a retirement home and organizes parties for a Boys and Girls Club. But her favorite volunteer activity, she says, is returning to Teague Middle School in Altamonte Springs, Fla., to help the teachers who taught her English when she came here from Russia in seventh grade.
Aleksandrova, who has a 4.59 grade-point average at Lake Brantley High School, is applying to Harvard, Yale, Emory and Northeastern universities. She's banking on her grades and test scores to get her into one of those elite schools, but she knows volunteerism could give her an edge.
"It's something I do because I want to, not because I want attention," said Aleksandrova, 18. "But I'd like people to notice that I did do something above and beyond the norm."
Eager to gain entry to the nation's elite colleges, many high-school students are taking mission trips abroad, volunteering as research assistants and starting their own nonprofits â€" hoping these activities will open doors in the competitive world of college admissions.
More than 82 percent of high-school seniors performed volunteer work last year, according to the 2004 American Freshman survey, a national poll conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles. That's up from 74 percent a decade earlier and 66 percent in 1989.
Although college admissions officers discourage students from listing every canned-food drive they've led, many high-school juniors and seniors wonder how they can stand out from all the other students who are working at food banks, building houses for the poor and mowing yards for senior citizens.
Many of them are genuinely altruistic, of course, but some students and advisers view the college-admissions quest as a game of charitable one-upsmanship.
"The colleges are rewarding uniqueness," said Steven Roy Goodman, an educational consultant in Washington, D.C. "The students are simply responding to what the colleges are asking for."
College officials insist they don't want students to pad resumes, but Goodman says the country's selective colleges have established a pattern of admitting supervolunteers.
Students' attempts to fit that mold can appear desperate or calculating. Some figure out the hot-button issue on the campus of their choice â€" whether it's gay rights or the anti-war movement â€" and then volunteer at an AIDS hospice or a peace organization in their hometowns.
"Here's the conversation that takes place 10,000 times a week in America," said Mark Sklarow, executive director of Independent Education Consultants Association. "A kid says, `I just heard from my school counselor that, even though I have a 4.0 GPA and am in the 95th percentile on the SAT, unless I can show some way to stand out, I might not get into the college I want.'"
The parents and student then frantically search for a stellar volunteer activity â€" preferably one that can be accomplished in six months or less.
"Here they are, as a 17-year-old, needing to prove there's another side to them," said Sklarow. "They say, `Well, here's something we can do. Let's go build a school in Costa Rica.'"
Some parents and students do go overboard, says Carol McAlpin of Winter Park, Fla. But they don't need to, she said.
"I've been to a lot of these schools and heard their admissions spiels," says McAlpin, whose daughter attends Princeton and whose son is at Yale. "They say, `Don't fill your resume with a ton of stuff just to make you look good.' They're looking for authenticity, the things you love doing."
Maybe so, but when Chadd Clark was attending Trinity Preparatory School in Winter Park, he and his classmates were keenly aware of the emphasis colleges put on volunteerism.
"A lot of us did things big and small with the intention of putting it down on the resume," says Clark, 21, now a junior at Georgetown University. "I don't want that to sound cynical, but it's naive to disregard that. You're very aware of what's expected of you, and you look for avenues to fulfill that."
Clark scored a 1570 on the SAT, earned a 4.0 GPA and was co-valedictorian at his school. But he wasn't sure that would be enough to get him into Harvard, Princeton or Yale. So he tutored kids, co-taught a religious-education class at his church and created a Wall of Hope project after Sept. 11, 2001, a mural that was displayed at the Pentagon.
He was accepted at Johns Hopkins, Georgetown and Notre Dame universities.
But does it really work?
Once they've been admitted to college, many students are never sure what got them in - their grades, the interview or impressive volunteer work.
Glenford Samuels' counselors at Olympia High School in Orlando urged him to earn plenty of volunteer hours so he could secure a Bright Futures scholarship, which requires 75 hours of service.
Samuels volunteered more than that, though, because he wanted to. Yet, when he was interviewing at colleges, "I didn't really get much feedback," says Samuels, 18, a freshman on full scholarship at the University of Central Florida.
Now Samuels has cut back, volunteering occasionally at the campus radio station while he juggles a double major.
But on some campuses, kids keep on volunteering - with an eye on grad school.
