Much can be said for the benefits of volunteering for students. There is certainly a joy that comes with helping others. To tell most young people why they need to volunteer more should not be difficult. A good case can be made for it, no matter the circumstances. Much has been said about why it would be good for me to help others; about how I don’t really live for myself, but for others. How the most fulfilling life is the one lived for others. In other words, much has been said about ‘I’ and ‘me’. But have you ever wondered what the benefits would be for the institutions that volunteering students belong to?

Take universities, for example: how does a university benefit when more of its students and alumni embrace volunteering? What incentives does it have to encourage this behavior? As it turns out, there are quite a lot of good things that accrue to a university that promotes a generous and helpful spirit among its members. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, if for no other reason than to give a different yet positive and refreshing angle to the discussion on volunteering.  

Volunteering during university has a great impact on the development of skills and the gaining of valuable work experience. For a student, it means being in the field and doing things that they are likely to do in their actual careers. Volunteering at a real company has a way of putting a lot of the things you learned in school into perspective. It brings about a better understanding of the concepts that a student gained while in school and it forces them to apply these ideas in novel situations and even come up with their own models for different aspects of their careers work. 

For example, I noticed there were a lot of skills in the writers who decided to write my dissertation with the help of simple online plagiarism checker. Some of them were volunteers, and the valuable skills they gained were such that they will become great writers in their career someday.

While the benefits in terms of skill development are more obvious on the student side, they are a little subtler on the side of the university. For a university, the most important thing is to craft a curriculum that not only teaches its students the theories behind their careers, but also imparts valuable skills to them, allowing them to flourish and become competent professionals in their respective fields. It is therefore in the best interest of a university to adopt methods and systems that ensure that its students develop their skills in the most comprehensive and expedient way. Volunteering is one such method. By encouraging students to volunteer during their course, and perhaps even making volunteering a part of the curriculum, universities can improve the way their students learn and gain skills, making them even more competent productive and competent professionals in their careers. The positive impact this can have on the reputation of a university is quite significant, to say the least. 

 When students are in university, engaging only in university-related activities, they run the risk of being closed-minded and blind to the wider realities of life in general. While it is understandable that a university would want to build an environment that is conducive to learning, debate, introspection, and innovation, it is also important that the student population is not too insulated from the community at large. Here again volunteering plays an important role

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Volunteering enables students to interact closely with the community and, in the process, they acquire an awareness of the community outside of the university. This expands both their minds and their appreciation of what goes on in the world outside the university.

A university that encourages volunteering in its students nurtures truly global citizens who have a keen sense of empathy for the world around them. Only by fostering this faculty can the students truly make impactful and beneficial changes to the world. 

One of the roles that a university plays for its students is to promote the fostering of useful and productive networks. Networking is a valuable skill to be learned, no matter what your field, and universities that not only create extensive networks for their students and alumni, but also teach valuable networking skills, are obviously better than the ones that don’t. There are many ways to develop these networks, such as holding conferences, where original speech topics are tabled, organizing workshops, and volunteering.

Volunteering is an especially powerful way to teach students to network and also create networks for the university itself. By forming partnerships with various organizations that take in student volunteers from it, the university will also be forming powerful networks of future hiring partners. These are the same people who will want to hire students from the university, especially if they had a good experience with the volunteers. 

 This is not an exhaustive list. There are numerous benefits that a university can gain from a wider embrace of volunteering from its students. However, even in its brevity, this list highlights some of the most powerful benefits so as to demonstrate why a university has everything to gain and nothing to lose by encouraging volunteering in its students. 

Ray Campbell is a writer and editor for blog topics and dissertations in the field of education. He enjoys writing about different aspects of university life and advising both students and schools on how to make the educational experience a more wholesome one.