Founder · Senior Engineer · 11+ years educational mentorship
Founder, AI College Prep Academy · Engineer, eight years at Amazon and Ring · Eleven years in private education
Jinwoong is a 2018 UC Berkeley graduate who has worked the rare double track that makes AI College Prep Academy possible: eight years building software at companies that include Amazon and Ring (he is currently a senior software engineer), alongside eleven years running his own private education practice that began while he was still an undergraduate. He has also founded and shipped AI software for non-technical owners in a privacy-regulated healthcare industry — work that sharpened the exact skill the teaching here is built around: showing people who aren't engineers how to use, evaluate, and direct AI in real work. Across more than eighty mentees he has placed students at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Northwestern, Georgia Tech, and other top-twenty universities, and his students have been admitted to selective summer programs including the Wharton M&TSI and have been district winners of the Congressional App Challenge.
8 yrs
Building software at Amazon and Ring
80+
Placements at top-20 universities
11 yrs
Private education, 10+ of them college consulting and SAT/ACT prep
Where 80+ mentees have landed
Career arc · 11+ years
The continuity is what makes the difference. Across more than eighty mentees, the relationship continues past the admit letter — into first internships, first full-time roles, and into graduate-school admissions.
Stage 01
Across 80+ students placed at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Northwestern, Georgia Tech, and other top-twenty universities — through 11+ years of 1:1 mentorship outside this program.
Stage 02
A select group of mentees has gone from admit to first internship at top-tier engineering and product orgs.
Stage 03
Several mentees stayed through career launch — full-time roles in product management, software engineering, and data science at Fortune 500 companies, and admissions to top-ten medical and law programs.
Why this is taught by an engineer
11 years in private education, including 10+ years of college consulting and SAT/ACT prep · 80+ placements at top-20 universities · 8 years building software at Amazon and Ring · UC Berkeley 2018
For eight years Jinwoong built software at companies that include Amazon and Ring, including AI products for people who are not engineers. That work is one skill: giving a tool a job and a written rule, checking what comes back, and fixing the rule when the tool is wrong.
That is exactly what a student needs from an AI agent, the study helper with written rules they build here, and it is why the agent’s rules are written by the student, tested with a person, and kept by the family. Most programs hand students an app; the app does not teach the rule.
The eleven years of private education, more than ten of them college consulting and SAT/ACT prep, are the other half: the calendar, the transcript, the essays that have to be true. The 80+ placements at top-20 universities are the founder’s record, not a promise about any one student.
No score, admission or placement is promised. AI explains, quizzes and organizes; it never writes what a student submits, and it does not know or remember anyone. The student’s written page carries the continuity.
A project that genuinely helps people reads to admissions readers very differently from one that does not. That is the thread running through every passion project we help students design — across pre-med, pre-law, and pre-software intersections — and it is the foundation of every decision in the curriculum.
— Jinwoong Lee, Founder
Work with Jinwoong
Thirty minutes, no pitch. Bring the next date on your student's calendar and you leave with at least one thing worth doing whether or not we work together.
No score, admission or placement promises. Nobody honest can make one, and we say so in writing.