Alumni Feature – Kate Weiser
From the third floor of Kilachand Hall to over 200,000 Instagram followers, and reels that regularly get millions of views, Kate Weiser (COM ’19) knows Boston.
The BU and KHC Alum runs the Instagram account @bucketlistboston. What is now many people’s go-to for New England-area recommendations started out as a personal passion project.
“I had spent my freshman fall semester exploring and just taking photos on my iPhone of Boston and everything that I was doing. And by the end of that semester, my phone storage was full,” Weiser explained. “I was like, ‘What can I do with these pictures?’ I found this photographers community called IG Boston that I could apply to become a member of. Long story short, I was rejected three times, but by the third rejection, I was like, ‘I don’t need them. I’m just gonna share my photos on a page.’”
So she did, the name Bucket List Boston coming from her affinity for alliteration and the desire to include a nod to BU, where the whole idea was born.
Turning the page into a Keystone project was a no-brainer for the Public Relations major, and her minor in Computer Science pushed her to create a website to further enhance the utility for her audience.
“My Keystone project felt like a really nice marriage of everything that I was studying with what I had been doing on the side all of college. I coded the website and designed it and created the first version of bucketlistboston.com,” Weiser said
“Instagram is amazing for discovery, and obviously now you can save and you can make folders, but it’s not really that helpful if, let’s say you’re going to visit Boston for the weekend, and you’re like, ‘where should I go to brunch?’ And you find my page, it’s going to be hard to find my brunch posts right in an organized way. So my thought process behind making the website was to have it be more organized and more valuable to someone who’s looking for something in particular.”
Through the years and 2,697 posts (as of April 19), Weiser has been featured as a part of Terrier Tuesday, in BU Today, the Daily Free Press, Bostonia, and Boston Voyager Magazine, to name a few. Her content has grown with her page, developing from the perspective of a New Yorker studying in Boston to someone who has become a proud Bostonian.
“My content [used to skew] more towards students because I was showing people what I was truly doing. I only post real recommendations. So as I’ve gotten older and I have more time to experience the city, I would say my content is more broad. So I’m still featuring free things. I’m still showing how, like the walks on the Esplanade and other things that are accessible to students. But I’m also getting to go try, like, an amazing spa in Western Massachusetts, and do more high end experiences as well,” she said.
“I am adding to what types of things I’m showcasing. My style has definitely evolved over time too. I mean, when I look back at my original content, it’s extremely oversaturated. I’ve gotten way more natural with my shots. I like to do minimal editing. I want it to feel like the real thing. I don’t want someone to see something and then go in real life and be like this looks nothing like what I saw online. So I feel like, in general, social media has shifted this way, and I’ve seen that with my content as well.”
The eagerness and authenticity that Weiser approaches her work with comes through in the content she puts out, posting nearly every day, sometimes multiple times a day, and keeping her story updated with the best of Boston. She has built a space that people not only look to for inspiration, but also one that people want to contribute to. Since starting and running the page all on her own, Weiser has since brought on a pair of assistants and an intern.
“Everyone that I’ve hired or brought on the team has reached out to me and asked if they can come work for me, and I feel so lucky to be in a position where that’s the case,” said Weiser. “I just feel very blessed to have created something that other people want to be a part of.”
A point-person for everything from coffee shops to scenic walks, Kate Weiser turned rejection into motivation, building a platform rooted in curiosity, consistency, and a genuine love for the city she once arrived in as a student.
To find out more about Kate’s recommendations and reflection, read the Q&A below!
Q&A with Kate Weiser
The first time you were interviewed by BU Today in 2017 you listed your three favorite places as Marlboro Street, Trident and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Has that list changed with time?
“I still love all three of those spots, honestly. So shout out to me for picking evergreen classics. If I were to pick my three favorite places right now, they would be the Athenaeum, the Public Garden, and Imagine, a cafe in Cambridge.”
What would you call the defining moments for Bucket List Boston, other than the early rejections we talked about?
“First, I was featured as a Terrier Tuesday as a sophomore at BU, which was when people who I didn’t know on campus started to learn about the page. Before that, it was like all my friends and like my professors. So that was like the first tier of strangers knowing about what I was doing.
Later, I found out that the Boston Globe, at the time, had a column called “My Instagram.” I pitched myself three times. The first two times I was ghosted, no reply, and then the third time they got back to me and said, “Yeah, we’ll feature you for that column.” So I was written up in the Boston Globe. That was a pivotal moment, because I felt like, up until then, BU people knew about me, but it was confined to campus, and the globe feature kind of catapulted awareness for me into a broader sphere across the city of Boston, which was really amazing.
More recently, what comes to mind is when I had the chance to sit down with Governor Maura Healey at Boston Logan when she was announcing therapy dogs at the airport to alleviate flyers’ anxiety. I got to sit down with her and do an interview and ask for whatever I wanted, which was really, really cool.
I also got to speak about influencers at the Boston Globe Summit. So I feel so honored to have become like a trusted voice in the city around this space.”
With everything that you know and have experienced now, if you could go back in time, what things would you be sure to do as a college student in Boston?
“Take advantage of Student Nine tickets to see the Red Sox. I feel like everyone knows about them, but people don’t use them as much as they should, and it’s an amazing experience to have Fenway Park be so close to campus and to have the accessibility with the price of the tickets in general.
Use your student ID to get into all of the museums and all of the things that you can do for free when you have that. I feel like that’s something that I didn’t take as much advantage of as I could have.
The biggest one would be to get out of the BU bubble. I chose BU because it was in the heart of Boston, and I wanted to be in a city. And I imagine most people we would ask on Comm Ave would say the same thing, but I don’t think that people really get on the T and take the bus and walk to all of the surrounding areas and really see Boston. You have the city at your fingertips, and you’re only here for four years if you’re leaving after graduation, and that there’s a lot to see, you just have to look for it.”
Interview and profile by Gabby Church, Communications Assistant (CAS ’26)