Episode 105: Storytelling – The Secret to Your Dream College With Kate Stone, College Consultant & Essay Coach at University Gurus

Kate is a seasoned College Admissions Consultant and College Essay Coach. She received her education from NYU and previously served as a Princeton University teaching fellow in Asia. Kate transformed her passion for creative writing and storytelling into actionable strategies for the college admissions process, essays, and applications. Her program coaches students to develop and strategize their most powerful narratives based on their individual ideas and achievements. Kate's students have been accepted to Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, University of Chicago, Brown, Barnard, NYU, and UPenn, among many others.

Why should anyone care about college essays?

The shift that we have had from quantitative to qualitative has happened for a number of reasons. A big part of it has to do with the Macro level. There is a growing general level of students applying for college so access to academic opportunities and education has increased. More and more students have the academic qualifications to apply to these elite universities. Also, more and more families have the financial means to afford those universities. The enrollment numbers may remain static, although they definitely decrease this year. Because there are far more qualified applicants and seats available, they can’t necessarily gauge an application anymore based on the quantitative, you have to shift to the qualitative assessment. Once the student has passed the first door then it comes to their stories. The college wants to understand a student’s character, drive, engagement, impact, and dreams and also wants to fill niches. Sometimes the only way to really understand what those students might fill in terms of a niche is through an essay. What was discovered is that there is a great emphasis on character development and personal development. They really valued applicants who have not gone through a challenge. Applicants do not need a story like that but they do need to have gone through some sort of journey, mentally, intellectually, spiritually, or even personal identity wise to show growth. They want students with a certain level of maturity to go to these universities. Since it is a high-performance and high-achieving high-status school, they want students there who have a certain baseline of self-awareness, self-understanding, and a capacity to self-inquire. The only way to really understand that is if a student is ready for that is to read their essay.

What makes an admissions counselor stop at an essay and say “this is amazing”?

There are many reasons as to why an admissions counselor would stop at an essay they think is amazing. The first is seeing an application where a student has a main interest in something they have done and they have explored it on multiple different levels and not just within the container of school, not just within the formality or some type of summer program or college course but really explored it in many possible ways as they can find. Finding other inroads does create a communicating level of ingenuity, independence, and initiative. The admissions counselor sees that they are really into their interest and are genuinely passionate about this. Another reason can be that a student can be really good in their area of interest and so they combined that interest with something that is service orientated. For example, there is a student who has an interest in music and music theory and was working with adults, young adults who were autistic or has learning differences. By using music as a form of therapy and following the interest even further into the effective music on the brain and research. The student took something she loved and committed a lot of time and energy in addition to applying it in another context. This shows the admission counselor that the student can think for themselves and that they are ready to go to college and make the university look good.

What are some coaching techniques to help students get into college?

The first step is to be realistic. The coach will sit down with the students and evaluate their grades and extracurriculars but if you do not have the requirements and the resume to back up the application for the college of the student’s choice, then the coach will recommend not to apply there. If they want to apply for fun then the coach will not stop them but if they are not meeting the standards then it will be a waste of time applying to that college of their choice. They should be focused on targets and likelihood and putting their energy into crafting those applications into as good as they can be versus wasting time on monstrous applications like Havard and Yale. The first step to filling out an application and essay is to figure out what the content is. What the student should be looking for is a thread and a lens to hang all the content. They need to figure out the core of the story because at the beginning they are looking for the content and then it is just putting the puzzle pieces together and finding the creative story structure through that process.

Contact Kate Stone

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherinestone1/

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