My College Pack

Say you spent your entire high school career taking really hardcore rigorous courses, got a great SAT score, played one sport every year, were involved in your school newspaper 1 year, and tutored the freshmen 1 year. Would a job be too important to your college admission?
Public high school.
Good grades.
Decent GPA
No Job commitment

For my college admissions essay, I have chosen to write about a volunteer experience that I had. I’m thinking about going into detail about the actual experience, and then explaining how the experience effected me as a person.
Is this a good topic?

There are so much statistics avaialble on net for US College admissions that it confuses me. How to narrow down the search to select only a few colleges so that I can apply to them?