Proposal

In 2004, 15.5 million children between the ages of 12 and 18 contributed more than 1.3 billion hours of service. Clearly, it seems like teenagers enjoy volunteering for the most part if they’ve concluded with a result like this. But the real question is which type of volunteer opportunities benefits teenagers the most for their futures? This is the question that my project is revolving around, so hopefully after all the research and my action plan I can find an answer to it. There’s obviously a ton of different things teenagers can do to benefit themselves or others, but I’m sure there’s certain ones that benefit them more than others. Some experts believe that volunteering can benefit anyone at any point throughout their lives, “volunteering makes good business sense during all stages of the life cycle. From the student learning a new skill to the senior practicing old skills, working at a volunteer job can be practical and fulfilling” (Halpern). All volunteering requires is the thought, time, and dedication of an individual and in the end they receive the benefit of anything from a good feeling inside, to community service hours, to experience in a future career, and the benefits go on and on.

One of my main points in basing my project on volunteering is to bring more awareness to it and to the amount of people that participate in volunteering opportunities. It ends up, that for the most part people end up enjoying their opportunity and feel as if it pays off. For teenagers, volunteering can have a huge impact on their life and the choices ahead of them. Having things like volunteering/community service listed on college applications and resumes can really get someone to look at you twice. You have a higher chance of getting accepted into a good college or your personal college of choice if you have volunteer hours listed on your application, this often times impresses the person reviewing your application. A lot of colleges say that it doesn’t really matter if you don’t have a really high GPA or really high scores on college admission tests such as the SAT or ACT. College admission professionals often are impressed if individuals write an essay based on their volunteer work or extracurricular activities.

Time (months)	What To Do
November	· Finish proposal · make sure I have enough background information on my topic · make sure I have interview questions ready in case an interview would pop up
December	· Start looking for better places to volunteer · begin calling/contacting people to get more information
January-August	· Volunteer somewhere (or multiple places) · get pictures of the experience · complete an interview or two · begin more research · create student survey to see how many teenagers volunteer/how many enjoy it/benefit from it, hand it out, get results · etc.

Within the time span of the next few months there’s going to be a lot of work entailed. To finish off November and my first trimester of Graduation Project, I will need to make sure I have my interview questions fully prepared and all notes complete for my foundation questions. The last thing that will be completely necessary for November is completing this proposal fully and having a full grasp on what I’m in for with this project and the work in months to come.

For my graduation project I will need multiple different resources. Some of the technological based resources that I will need are: Microsoft Office Word, maybe Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office PowerPoint, Internet/search engines, and maybe a few other programs depending on which direction my project goes. PowerPoint is going to be a very important aspect of my final project because it’s going to have all of my final information, tables/graphs, talk about my experience volunteering, and in general just publicize my project to everyone. Supporters, interviewees, and volunteers are a few other essential resources towards my project. By ‘supporters’ I mean someone/multiple people who will maybe go and volunteer with me to make an even bigger difference at the location I decide to volunteer at – a few people who seemed to be onboard so far are my mom and Larry Hailsham. Maybe I’ll be able to find a location that would fit all of our schedules and would work out well in the end with a really positive outcome and great experience.

By the end of my project, hopefully I’ll have a really good result with good research, good evidence, statistics, and the personal benefit of volunteering. I plan on creating a survey for students (and maybe teachers) in City High to take so that I can get the results of who volunteers, if they enjoyed it/benefited from it, etc., and in the end hopefully turn that information into some type of graphical feature on my PowerPoint presentation to back up my point of teenagers benefiting from volunteer work. Also, I will have a few slides talking about my personal experience at wherever I happen to volunteer at and hopefully have pictures as well.