Why Top Colleges Are Rejecting ‘Perfect’ Students with Kate Stone (Ep. 104)
What if everything you think you know about college admissions is wrong?
In this electrifying episode, Iván Watanabe and Evan Wohl sit down with Kate Stone, founder of Kate Stone Prep, to unpack why getting into college and building a meaningful life takes more than grades and a good essay. Drawing from her roots in acting, global teaching experience, and years of mentoring students through transformative projects, Kate explains how real-world skills, big goals, and personal authenticity are redefining the college prep game.
She doesn’t just coach students to write their best essays; she coaches them to live their best stories.
What to expect in this episode:
- Why AP classes and volunteer hours are no longer enough
- How “special projects” and mentorship open doors beyond academics
- The shocking truth about how few students are prepared for real life
- A behind-the-scenes look at building college essays that stand out
- And so much more!
Connect with Iván Watanabe:
- Opus Private Client, LLC
- iwatanabe@opus-pc.com
- LinkedIn: Iván Watanabe
- YouTube: OPUS Private Client, LLC
Connect with Evan Wohl:
Connect with Kate Stone:
- LinkedIn: Kate Stone
- Kate Stone Prep
- Instagram: @katefrancestone
- (203) 714-4435
About Our Guest:
Kate Stone is an Experienced College Admissions Consultant and College Essay Coach. Kate received her B.S. in Education and a minor in Creative Writing. She continued on as a teaching fellow in Asia. Kate transformed her passion for storytelling into actionable strategies for the college admissions process, essays, and the application as a whole. Her program coaches students to develop and strategize their most powerful narratives based on their individual ideas and achievements.
Some of Kate’s strategies include: Creating a Balanced College List, How to Choose an Essay Topic, College Essay Format: Narrative Structure vs. Montage Structure, How to Approach the Additional Information Section and Why it’s Important, Tackling the ‘Why Us’ Essays. Kate’s students have been accepted to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, University of Chicago, NYU, Brown, Berkeley, UPenn, USC, UCLA, The New School, Northwestern, Duke, Emory, and American University of Paris.
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