About Us
IvyZen is an exclusive mentorship community led by a team of 15 professionals with 85+ years of combined experience, dedicated to guiding a select group of high-potential students toward becoming future leaders. Through highly personalized support and world-class admissions strategy, we help students stand out and succeed at the most competitive US universities.
IvyZen’s full management team is made up of 15 with a total combined experience of 85 years. Our management team has been together for over a decade and work hard to ensure that our 40+ mentors from all over the world provide the absolute highest in mentoring services.
IvyZen is guided by our mission to mentor the next generation leaders and our culture and work is informed by our core values of excellence, responsibility, compassion, team work and results-orientation.
At IvyZen we excel at mentoring students to become their very best and make sure these the top US colleges take notice. Our purpose, our goal, our mission is to create next-generation leaders. Leaders are not born, they are made. They are made through hard work, pressure, stress, care and enlightenment. We don’t create happy-go-lucky, carefree kids, we create leaders, geniuses, powerful individuals who will change society for the better and live the most complete, happy, fulfilling lives.
IvyZen is an exclusive community, made up of a small number of the very brightest students and parents that match are philosophy on creating unique, next-generation leaders. To preserve the unique quality of our students and provide the very best in mentoring services, we severely limit the number of students we work with. Taking on too many students and our unique strategies lose their effectiveness. Out of the nearly 3.5 million students who apply to US colleges we only work with roughly 250 students at a time, which is less than 1% of 1% of the applicant pool. We also only accept x students per school, where x is the lesser of 8 or 1% of the high school student body. There are further constraints we place on the availability of our services to ensure IvyZen students are provided the very best in our leading-edge mentoring services.
✦ Staff
People Serving at IvyZen Access Fellowship
Mark I. Lee
Managing Director
IvyZen Access Fellowship / Founder, IvyZen
David Doherty
Academic Director
IvyZen Access Fellowship
Ju Yeon Sohn
Associate Director
IvyZen Access Fellowship
✦ Our Process
How we mentor
We don’t believe in a scattered set of tips and last-minute strategies. Over years of practice we’ve developed a comprehensive, continually refined approach we call a theme: a way of unifying a student’s passions, talents, and accomplishments into one clear and compelling story.
Working one-on-one, mentor and student build that theme together — whether it takes shape through founding an organization, leading original research, competing academically, or publishing creative work. Everything centers on two poles: leadership and scholarship. The result is an application that reflects a genuine person doing real, ambitious work — not a profile assembled to impress.
✦ Our Story
Built on more than two decades of expertise
The Fellowship is the mission-driven heart of IvyZen, a college mentoring practice founded in 2001. Over more than twenty five years, our mentors have guided over 1,000 students into the top US colleges. Our leadership team has worked together for over two decades, and our 40+ mentors around the world hold every student to the same standard of care.
This is not volunteer guidance assembled on the side. Fellows receive the identical mentorship — the same mentors, the same methodology, the same individual attention — that other families pay for. We simply remove the price.