While everyone interested in earning a Master of Business Administration degree in California is busy looking at their business school options, it’s equally true that the schools are looking right back at you. And if we’re honest, it’s less about the school you choose than the school that chooses you.
If you know, you know… the real challenge in the MBA world is getting into the right program, not getting through it.
Competition is fierce. Not all California business schools publish their acceptance rates, but among those in the Top 100, a 2024 analysis by Poets and Quants found less than half of applicants get in. At some schools, like Stanford GSB, it’s below 10 percent.
Because it sometimes seems like everyone and their skateboarding dog from the Santa Monica boardwalk is applying to California’s MBA programs, the entrance standards are stringent. The application process takes years to build up to and often months to go through.
That process will put you through all kinds of hoops:
- Studying for, taking, and acing the GMAT or GRE
- Completing one or more essays on your career path, history, aspirations, and reasons for applying, including in some cases a video essay
- Going through an in-depth interview process with admissions committees, alums, and current students
- Producing stellar letters of recommendation from supervisors, managers, or other figures of responsibility and authority in your life
Those are all tough measures to meet. But they’re also standardized yardsticks—every candidate is going to weigh in somewhere on those scales. But there is one more area where you really have a chance to set yourself apart and shine in the eyes of any admissions committee.
That’s the ECAs (or just ECs): Extra Curricular Activities.
Your Extracurricular Activities Are of Active Interest to California Business School Admissions Committees
Particularly when you are applying for slots at top schools, everyone has high test scores, everyone has a 3.5+ GPA, everyone has an undergrad degree from an elite college, everyone has put together a killer essay, everyone has a promising job or internship at a major corporation with glowing reviews behind them.
What’s left to distinguish yourself from the pack? What you do outside of work and school.
ECs can include hobbies, clubs, sports, or pretty much anything else you do in your free time, but much of what admissions committees look for is how you apply yourself in slightly more serious efforts. And that usually means an expression of your values and talents through volunteering.
Why Volunteerism Looms Large on the List of Extracurricular Activities Considered in MBA Admissions
Volunteering is hardly ever mentioned as a specific requirement in business school admissions. Yet everywhere you turn, you see other applicants, coaches, and even admissions team members talking about how important it is.
Volunteer experience is a valuable proxy for your character, so it’s something MBA admissions committees give careful attention when evaluating applications.
Because volunteer engagements are something that you have full control over, they are more valuable for assessing your personality and interests than work assignments. And because they are uncompensated, they show where your values are and how strong your motivation truly is.
Since every business school is looking at least as much at getting a good fit for their community and program goals as they are at your quantitative business accomplishments, volunteering is an important way for you to show you have the right personality and the right academic skills too.
Getting the right kind of volunteer experience is among the best ways to reinforce all the other key elements of a successful MBA admissions package.
Use Volunteerism to Build Experience You Didn’t Get on the Job
There is no getting around the experience bar when applying to elite MBA degree programs. Most recommend anywhere from one to five years of professional work experience; on the other hand, not many actually require it. Still, without any kind of real-world management or leadership experience, you’ll have a tough time making it past the first round of cuts at competitive programs.
MBA applicants are stuck in the classic Catch-22 of entry-level candidates everywhere: you need experience to get into positions where you can gain experience.
Volunteering is one of the best ways to cut that loop.
You have limited control over the types of projects or work experience you get at a corporation. In a volunteer capacity, though, you can stick your hand up to get involved with whatever level of responsibility you think you want to take on.
Build a Well-Rounded Background with the Right Volunteer Gigs
One phrase you will find over and over and over in business school application packets is “well-rounded.”
In theory, that’s an easy quality to describe.
Well-rounded: Having a personality that is fully developed in all aspects. ~ New Oxford American Dictionary
In practice, it’s something you have to demonstrate through action and activity. In many cases, that’s going to be with genuine contributions to your community and society. Volunteerism is one of the most straightforward ways to make those contributions… and to show business schools that you mean business when it comes to your values.
Greed may be good, but it’s definitely not the only good.
Volunteering serves to demonstrate that you have a commitment that goes beyond profit motive alone. Although business schools are in some ways the height of the capitalist system, they are also fully aware of their obligations to society. They are looking for candidates who have more to them than greed.
Use Volunteerism to Showcase Your Strengths as a Businessperson
Volunteering also allows you to demonstrate strengths that otherwise may not be apparent in your application packet.
For example, if you’re coming to an MBA degree not long after graduating with your four-year degree, there’s an excellent chance that you simply don’t have the opportunity to show leadership skills through work. It takes time to be promoted, to take on increasing levels of responsibility.
But volunteers are often thrown into the deep end without a great deal of real-world experience behind them. A small Bay Area needle exchange struggling to keep up with logistics and accounting on a tight budget could have their processes completely revitalized by a business-minded volunteer with basic bookkeeping and organizational skills.
That’s easy to say, of course, and assumes you have the kinds of skillset it might take, plus the ability to find the right opportunity to apply it. It’s far easier to find a position with an established, larger organization with well-defined roles.
On the other hand, the best kind of volunteer experience for MBA applications is the kind that shows results. It’s a fine thing to walk shelter dogs three times a week around Potrero Hill and you’re a good person for doing it, but it doesn’t demonstrate much in the way of leadership or management aptitude.
Taking on projects like a trail maintenance event in the Big Sur, helping a non-profit in San Diego hit their financial goals, or helping organize a massive one-night point in time count of unhoused individuals in Sacramento helps show admissions committees what you are capable of accomplishing.
Look for Opportunities to Diversify Your Volunteer Experience
California is the most diverse state in the nation, and California business schools have some of the most colorful and varied MBA classes in the world. More than half of admits are minorities at many California business schools.
That creates a different kind of culture here, and drives a requirement that many MBA program applicants don’t fully appreciate when going into the process.
How have you demonstrated your ability to work in diverse teams?
This is a question that comes up often in adcom interviews. It can be a challenge to answer for anyone with limited work experience in a single company or even a single industry. Overall, the Californian workforce is as diverse as the state itself, but there’s plenty of concentration within various industries and roles.
Being thoughtful about the organizations you volunteer with can expand your horizons and give you meaningful experiences working with diverse teams. These kinds of opportunities are uniquely accessible in California.
You’ll find those opportunities at naturalization workshops in the Central Valley, spending time mentoring kids whose neighborhoods are overrun by gangs, or even volunteering with international aid organizations like the International Rescue Committee, which works with asylum seekers in LA. Any of these can broaden the scope of your experience beyond the workplace and give you important insights and valuable experience engaging with diversity.
A Volunteer Placement Gives You Something to Talk About in Applications and Interviews
Frankly, volunteering is also a way to create content for your equally important application essay and interview process. People who haven’t done a lot by the time they get to graduate school are going to have some pretty boring answers on a lot of the most common interview topics.
Interviewing for MBA admissions can be like dating in LA:
- Rule 1: Be interesting
- Rule 2: Don’t not be interesting
If you haven’t done much with your life, there’s a good chance you’re not going to be very interesting to the typical B-school adcom.
Volunteering is a good way to simply give you something interesting to talk about and tie your story to. Maybe you aren’t coming in the door with a lot of professional business experience, but if you have been volunteering part time with your local mountain rescue group in the Sierra Nevada, you’ve probably got some stories that will keep your interviewers glued to their seats.
Volunteering Can Eradicate Blank Spaces on Your Resume
This isn’t a factor for everyone who is applying to business programs, but there are candidates who otherwise have empty spaces in their CV. Maybe it’s a gap year after your bachelor’s, maybe it’s a period of unemployment during which you made your decision to upskill with an MBA.
Either way, the typical admissions committee wants to know what you’ve been up to with your spare time. The answer “Sitting on the couch watching Shark Tank re-runs” is not favorably received.
Anyone in that position will be doing themselves a big favor by getting a regular volunteer gig that gets them out of the house and contributing to some worthy cause on a regular basis. When your answer is “Giving back to the community,” you will show the kind of ambition and drive that adcoms want to see.
What Kind of Volunteer Gig Will Help You the Most on Your Way to an MBA in California?
Most MBA admissions directors are clear that there is no one specific kind of volunteer experience they are looking for. Instead, it’s more about your engagement and takeaways from the volunteer process.
The corollary to this is that volunteering just to put another line on your application form isn’t likely to be helpful. If you aren’t genuinely involved and interested in the experience, it’s going to show up quickly—and get your application sent to the bottom of the stack just as fast.
Volunteering is also a form of networking, so if that is one of your motivations in going to business school in the first place, it should also help drive your choices and enthusiasm for volunteer roles.
It’s also true that it’s better to start earlier than later in building that experience. If you’re only getting serious about volunteering in the lead-up to dropping your applications in the mail, you may have to answer some pointed questions about why your life-long passion for mentoring underserved minority youth only showed up a few months ago.
Gaining Volunteer Experience While Working Full Time – How Do You Even Do That?
Volunteer experience has primarily caught on in the MBA world as a way for applicants who don’t have a current corporate position to demonstrate some of their ambition and values to admissions committees with an option outside of work.
But it has become such a key piece of many applications that even executives who are working overtime in corporate management positions are sometimes expected to layer on some volunteer time to pad out their application.
This can be a huge if not insurmountable time commitment. It’s also tough to master the level of passion that adcoms are looking for when you’re already exhausted from a 60-hour work week.
For these people, Corporate Social Responsibility may be the ticket.
Many companies, large and small, put together volunteer opportunities for their staff. These are designed around your work environment and cut through some of the obstacles that full-time staff often face in volunteering. California, with a higher social awareness than many states, has a rich tradition of corporate CSR programs.
Of course, your company is the ultimate place to check these out, but various regional groups like the Corporate Volunteer Council of Orange County have networking and strategies that help companies put these groups together. If your company doesn’t already have a CSR option, these organizations can help get the ball rolling.
Understanding Skills Versus Values-Based Volunteering and How They Impact MBA Applications
It can be helpful to break down volunteering opportunities into two buckets:
- Skills-based - Positions that not just anyone can fill that require genuine capabilities in specific business or leadership skills. These could include team leads, project management, marketing, or logistics roles. They demonstrate specific abilities you have that apply directly to your MBA goals.
- Values-based - Values based volunteer positions demonstrate your beliefs by backing them up with good works, but don’t require any particular talent or level of personal development. It speaks well of you that you serve up soup at a homeless shelter three nights a week, but that doesn’t tell admissions teams anything about your accounting, leadership, or organizational abilities.
Either kind of volunteering can serve your interests in admissions, but combining the two is probably the most valuable option.
Of course, there are plenty of choices that put both together, as well. You can demonstrate your commitment to the unhoused by working as lead on a Habitat for Humanity project in Chico with Butte County Habitat; you can showcase your commitment to both the environment and California’s communities by taking a spot as a Volunteer Core Leader with the California State Parks Foundation.
Avoid Focusing Too Much on Just Checking the Box for Volunteer Work on Your MBA Application
What you don’t want is to reduce your volunteerism to some sort of virtue signal described in shallow platitudes on your MBA application.
One of the most common pointers to the value of volunteer experience is that it will help you stand out among other applicants. But, of course, other applicants are reading this same collection of resources and advice, volunteering at many of the same organizations, and coming up with many of the same takeaways that will show up on their essays and in their interviews.
Rather than idealizing or attempting to optimize volunteer experiences for your MBA application, you’re going to be better off finding meaningful ways to express your genuine and legitimate personal values and interests through volunteering.
The surest way to build volunteer experience that actually helps you stand out and find acceptance in MBA programs is to avoid rote formulas you find on the internet.
Instead, dig deep. The real key to success is to find a volunteer commitment that motivates you personally, that you feel genuine excitement about fulfilling. That dedication and expertise will come across to admissions committees.
Or go the other direction: go broad. If you don’t have a single passion to involve yourself in, then take on several and take some chances. Keep an open mind and volunteer in efforts you may never have considered before. Give yourself many experiences to compare and contrast, and show your flexibility along the way.
A hidden benefit to volunteering to prepare for your MBA application is that volunteer experience is also a benefit on your resume when you start applying for jobs after business school.
At the end of the day, you are always going to be better off talking to an admissions committee about experiences that you find genuinely interesting and fulfilling than something you did just because someone on the internet told you that you were supposed to.
How To Sell Your Volunteer Experience to the California Business School You’re Vying for
Because volunteerism isn’t a formal requirement, it’s going to be up to you to figure out how to present it as a positive in your MBA application.
Believe it or not, this can be a regional deal. Out here on the West Coast, the education is just as intensive as any Ivy League business program, but the personalities are a lot more laid back. Interviews aren’t so high-pressure, and you may be better off highlighting your volunteer experience in a more low-key way.
You generally won’t be asked directly about your volunteerism, so the onus is on you to integrate your volunteer experience into the application and interview process.
It’s noteworthy that many MBA interviews are conducted blind, with the interviewer not being given access to your full application packet, but only your resume. So you will not want to assume they have read anything you have written about your experiences; you’ll need to incorporate your volunteer stories into your answers to other common questions about goals, leadership and work experience.
Incorporating your volunteer experience into your application is more straightforward. Personal statements and essays are tailor-made for expounding on this kind of information. Many applicants find ways to build entire essay answers around stories of volunteer experience.
Exploring Volunteer Opportunities in California That Are Ideal for MBA Applicants
California MBA candidates are blessed with an abundance of choices and a diversity of volunteer opportunities that few other states can match. IRS data shows nearly 145,000 nonprofits registered in the state. A survey by the National Council of Nonprofits found them to be tremendously understaffed, with four out of five currently experiencing job vacancies.
In part, that’s because Californians aren’t exactly champing at the bit to give their time to the causes they believe in. U.S. Census and AmeriCorps data puts the state 47th in the country for volunteerism rates, with less than 20 percent of citizens engaged in active, formal volunteer work.
California’s civic dereliction is your shot at a shiny volunteering resume for a California B-school application, however.
Volunteer for Board Positions at Charitable Organizations: Sure-Fire Leadership Experience with a Significant Commitment
Boards have become a go-to opportunity for volunteer experience, particularly for candidates without a lot of time on their hands but who already have significant work experience. It’s easier to be taken seriously for board positions when you are already out in the business world, and it’s less of a time commitment than many traditional kinds of volunteer work.
Board positions are all about leadership—a quality that admissions committees are always on the look-out for.
Unpaid volunteer board positions are relatively easy to land, since a lot of people don’t want the responsibility. Yet it’s that responsibility that makes them a good bet for demonstrating your own abilities.
On the other hand, it can be harder to find open board positions in the first place—generally, they are not advertised as openly as other volunteer positions. Ideally, most organizations will prefer someone who is already known to them, and who knows and understands their mission. So sometimes your best shot is simply to become a volunteer first, while you feel one another out.
But there are a few organizations in California which do focus on making connections between non-profits and prospective board members in their region.
Serving Orange County, OneOC includes board positions in their volunteer search portal, and offers training to prospective board members to educate them on the role and its legal obligations.
The Bay Area is blessed by two such philanthropic organizations; CVNL serves non-profits in Marin, Napa, Solano, and Sonoma Counties. And since it uses the same search database as a number of other volunteer listing sites, you may also surface opportunities elsewhere.
CEN covers non-profits in Silicon Valley, and works a bit differently than matching websites. The process here is more intensive and more old-school. Applicants have to go through the complimentary Building Representative Boards program to study effective board governance and responsibilities. At the conclusion of the training, they attend a board matching event with non-profits which have been going through the flip side of the program, learning how to engage wider representation and set their boards up for success.
CauseCupid covers the LA area and is a subscription-based service that delivers board recruiting and development services.
Creating Your Own Volunteer Opportunity by Starting a Charitable Project
Looking for volunteer opportunities that match your interests, area, and energy can be time-consuming. Even in a state as big and in need as California, you can come up dry when trying to pinpoint the perfect match.
But there’s one way around this that a handful of motivated MBA applicants pick instead: creating their own non-profit or charitable outreach effort.
This isn’t a route for the faint-hearted or commitment averse. Starting your own California nonprofit public benefit corporation and then folding will look worse than never volunteering anywhere at all.
The flip side, however, is that it’s a mirror image of what it takes to set up any other kind of corporation. By going through the effort of filing articles of incorporation, setting up a board of directors, drafting bylaws, and filing numerous tax and regulatory forms with federal and state authorities, you’re showing admissions committees a level of initiative and capability that merely volunteering for someone else will never accomplish.
Resources for Finding MBA-Worthy Volunteer Positions in California
Really, the best way to find volunteer opportunities is simply by being engaged with your community and following your heart… you’ll see where the needs are soon enough.
But California is a big state and it’s easy to miss some of the opportunities that might spark your interests the most. So this list of organizations and associations with pointers to all sorts of different volunteering options can help you find the perfect fit.
One of the best and easiest ways to find volunteer opportunities in your corner of California is through the state-run California Volunteers site. Powered by VolunteerMatch, this site allows you to pick a location, choose a category of volunteering, and look at opportunities by date ranges if you are crunched for time. You’ll get a thumbnail description of the organization and the opportunities if offers along with a quick link to a contact form to get in touch.
If you’re looking for a more indirect route, but one that is more likely to turn up organizations that aren’t established enough to register with VolunteerMatch, the California Association of Nonprofits keeps a directory of nonprofit organizations across the state with every conceivable kind of mission. The organization lists jobs as well as nonprofits themselves, which can give you a line on what kind of expertise is needed, even if you are only looking to volunteer.
Billed as the world’s largest digital volunteer network, you’ll find tens of thousands of California-based volunteer opportunities registered on Points of Light. If you’re taking the rare step of starting up your own project, you can even post listings to find other people to volunteer.
This Newark-based non-profit keeps a catalog of organizations in the Tri-Cities area as diverse as the Salvation Army and Urban Forest Friends.
If you are based in Los Angeles, it’s hard to find a more comprehensive resource for finding local volunteer gigs. You can search by availability or interest, and special event volunteer opportunities can connect you with one-shot options for when you are short on time or just interested in trying something new. The organization also offers workshops and trainings to help get you up to speed on certain skill-based volunteering gigs, like public health, teaching job skills to at-risk youth, or working in wildfire mitigation.
Inspiring Bay Area kids with the natural wonder and stewardship of California’s environment is a sure way to show leadership and educational potential. If your passion is California’s natural wonder, you can get the training and mentorship here to volunteer in schools and with community programs like nature walks or docent positions.
Making a difference to low-income or homeless school age children and senior citizens in the San Fernando Valley is your mission with Volunteer League. With a strong track record since 1952, it’s a way to demonstrate community involvement… and showcase your singing voice, as part of the Choral Music Troopers entertaining in senior centers if you choose.
Becoming a Big Brother or Sister is a significant commitment, but it’s exactly that kind of in-depth, selfless dedication that makes admissions committees sit up and take notice. Although it’s not conventional business leadership experience, the mentoring and responsibility that comes with the role have a huge value for executives. And with the kind of bonds you make, you’ll have no trouble talking about your experience with enthusiasm and conviction. There are 15 local affiliates organizations covering most of California, so odds are you will find one for your area here.
The Bay Area is home to a lot of good business schools and many, many ambitious businesspeople looking to apply to MBA programs. HandsOn helps connect people and companies in the area with high-quality volunteer projects that can help make those applications shine. Since the organization often works with major local companies to connect their employees with custom volunteer events, there’s a good chance you can encounter HandsOn through your own work. With a wide array of accessible projects from food preparation to running arts and crafts fairs for kids, there’s a good chance you’ll find something that fits your interests and will impress adcoms.
In a state where wildfires are fast becoming the most dangerous threat to public safety and property, there’s a real need everywhere for volunteers who can educate, train, and advocate for disaster safety. The organization also has roles in more specialized skill positions involving administration and communications work, which can be a real boon for your admissions essays and interviews.