Founder · Senior Engineer · 11+ years educational mentorship
Founder, AI College Prep Academy & CareMAR · Senior software engineer · 8 years building software
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 also founded CareMAR (caremar.us), software that helps small care homes and hospice facilities replace paper-based medication tracking with an AI-assisted app — built specifically for owners who aren't technical, in an industry governed by strict healthcare-privacy rules. The CareMAR work has sharpened the exact skill the AI College Prep Academy curriculum is built around: teaching people who aren't engineers to use, evaluate, and ship AI in real-world 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
Production software engineering
80+
Students placed at top universities
5
Tracks co-taught by working professionals
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.
Co-Teaching Faculty
Every track is co-taught by a working professional in that field — not a graduate student, not a generalist instructor. The mentor relationship continues past program end.
Northwestern Feinberg
A practicing physician-in-training who guides clinical-intake agents, evidence retrieval, and the ethics of deploying AI in patient-facing workflows.
UChicago Pritzker Law
A working attorney who guides contract-review agents, citation systems, and the framing problems unique to legal AI.
Booth / Kellogg alumni network
A practicing analyst who guides 10-K ingestion, sensitivity analysis, and the management-framing pattern recognition that turns reports into investment memos.
McCormick School of Engineering
A working hardware or systems engineer who guides CAD reasoning, tolerance analysis, and the manufacturability tradeoffs that distinguish a real engineering project from a toy demo.
Chicago tech founder ecosystem
A working founder who guides customer-discovery agents, pricing experiments, and the back-office automation that lets a one-person team feel like five.
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
Want to work with this faculty?
Selective by design
Selective admissions for the inaugural Summer 2028 cohort. We expect a 40 to 60 percent admit rate. Rolling applications through Spring 2028.