Educational Strategist

Jay is an experienced educational strategist, and has directly helped an extremely wide range of students from all over the world gain successful admission to selective US undergraduate programs. Since 2007, Jay has spearheaded numerous consulting teams and college prep programs both in the US and overseas.

As an admissions consultant, Jay thrives in creating and developing impactful application narratives and utilizing various multimedia contents to effectively deliver them for optimal admissions results. Jay puts significant value in the power of organic personal branding, and helps students kickstart personal branding in an educational setting.

Jay currently serves as Director of College Counseling at Willows Preparatory School, an elite IB day school located in Redmond, WA.

Test Prep Coach

Jay is humbly -- yet factually -- a world-class test prep guru, with multiple perfect scores in both SAT and ACT, and nearly-perfect scores in GRE, GMAT, and LSAT. Jay specializes in coaching high-performing students strategically and tactically tweak their game to take it to the next level — and closer to a perfect score.

In 2022, Jay founded Lettuce Learn, an online test prep service that utilizes a unique pattern-based problem-solving method that effectively nullifies disadvantages associated with standardized testing that inherently work against neurodivergence. Lettuce Learn was directly supported by a team of clinical psychologists, behavioral technicians, and special ed teachers. In the past 3 years, on average Lettuce Learn has helped its SAT-taking students improve by 287.3 points in just 8 weeks.

Jay currently serves as Chief Strategist at Lettuce Learn.

Education Service Developer

Jay's ultimate passion as an education entrepreneur is in service design, as he loves to develop innovative learning programs and support services that creatively address systemic inequalities in education.

For example, during COVID, Jay single-handedly created a partnership network and launched an educational management service that helped students short-cut from 9th grade to junior status at a national university in 2~2.5 years — a pathway that greatly benefited academically-advanced students who struggled with non-academic elements of K-12 education and/or have reason to expedite their path to an undergraduate degree.

The son of a biomedical engineer who dedicated his entire career to supporting paraplegics, Jay aspires to deep-dive into the application of adaptive technology into educational service design in order to help learners with shorter attention spans effectively handle critical reading and standardized testing.

  • LEADERSHIP

    Jay is a seasoned entrepreneur, and as such has extensive in all aspects of early-stage company-building, particularly in putting together impactful teams and leading them under a unified vision.

    On a related note, Jay is also well-versed in identifying and developing coaching talent, and genuinely finds meaning in lifting others up to their highest potential.

    He has served as an executive/director for various companies, ranging from early start-ups to publicly-owned companies.

  • NEURODIVERGENCE

    Jay has extensive experience in working with neurodivergent learners, ranging from ADHD poster children and twice-exceptional overachievers to non-verbal autistic power thinkers and introverted geniuses.

    Most recently he served as Managing Consultant for Golden Pennant, an educational consultancy group that specializes in providing wraparound support for neurodivergent learners.

    Jay is currently on a collaborative task force with the University of Washington’s School of Social Work and the JED Foundation in promoting mental health and preventing suicide.

  • MEDIA CONTENT

    In 2016, Jay hypothesized that the South Korean public would particularly enjoy American football (NFL) if and only if someone were to ‘teach’ them about it in their own language, in a way that they could understand.

    During the next 4 years, Jay wrote blogs, hosted radio shows and award-winning podcasts, co-authored a best-selling book, and became the first on-screen NFL analyst in the history of the nation.

    Through this project Jay gained invaluable understanding of how various online media contents influence societies and how information is responsibly delivered by media channels to the mass public.

  • MILITARY EXPERIENCE

    In 2009, Jay voluntarily enlisted himself in the Republic of Korea Army, and served his motherland as a FA Computation Specialist.

    During that time, he created and managed a reintegration program for officers and soldiers to prepare for and earn language-based certificates. For this effort, Jay was awarded a Commander-in-Chief Commendation and was granted permanent dual citizenship upon honorary discharge.

  • PHILANTHROPY

    Jay’s ultimate interest as a person is in philanthropy, and as such he strives to stay involved in volunteerism as much as possible.

    A devoted Catholic, Jay serves as Director of Volunteerism at his church, in addition to teaching 8th graders in Sunday School.

    As a firm believer in intimate mentorship, Jay pays extra attention to mentoring young Asian American men in effectively balancing their two (or more) identities and confidently establishing themselves in their lives.