Letters from Clients, 2022

Letter #1

May 2022

Hello,

I'm a working professional and student who took Mr. Jung's class for about a year starting in early 2021, and I start a T16 MBA this fall.

Thanks to Mr. Jung, I got into the school I'd been aiming for, and I wanted to leave this recommendation hoping it helps other people, too.

I kept hitting a wall at every stage of the process, from the GMAT to the essays to the interviews. But through Mr. Jung's classes, I got help with not just the GMAT but applications, interview prep, everything. I think that's what carried me through this whole journey.

For reference, I applied to 13 schools that made the top 20 of U.S. News's 2022 MBA rankings, got interview invites from 8 of them, and before the interview schedule even wrapped up, I already had an admission from my target school, so I was able to close out the application process.

When I first started Mr. Jung's class, I scored 26 on the prep test, and low 20s on the actual exam. I had no feel whatsoever for how to tackle the questions. Honestly, I couldn't even tell you how that score came about. But eight months later, I was at 35, with all three sections improved across the board, and my verbal total went up by more than 10 points.

Honestly, as you can probably tell from the scores, all three verbal sections were weak for me.

First, Reading Comprehension. My reading was inaccurate and slow, and I got a lot of the questions wrong. To fix that, Mr. Jung gave me extra materials (not GMAT RC passages) so I could get a feel for how passages carry their tone. They were harder than actual GMAT questions, so I struggled through them, but once I came out the other side, I could feel that my ability to grasp contrasts and the author's tone had really grown.

Personally, Sentence Correction was the hardest part in the early days of the class. Since SC is all single sentences, there's no surrounding context to lean on like you get with RC, so when my reading hit a wall, all I could do was guess. But once the practice piled up, and I steadily reviewed those questions along with the teacher's feedback, this problem largely resolved itself. Tense and comparative questions were also a big source of wrong answers, but repeating them through custom problem sets aimed at my weak spots brought my accuracy up a lot.

For Critical Reasoning, just getting the hang of what he laid out on his blog was enough to handle 600-level questions: parsing number-heavy passages, spotting the contrast words, and reading for how the wording marked restriction, inclusion, or contrast. In class he'd also point out other attack points, and as I practiced applying them to the problems, I went from vaguely picking an answer to picking it with confidence.

What helped as much as the clear lectures was how he managed my study routine. The class runs on a system where you submit homework every single day, so even as a salaried worker I kept solving problems without long pauses. Studying five or more days a week built the confidence that I'd been preparing properly, and that got me through rough patches like slumps.

It must have been a hassle for him, too, sending problems out every day and keeping on top of the answers, but honestly that diligence is something I both respect and thank him for.

Beyond the verbal classes, he'd think harder than I did about things like which school to attend, what courses to take there, what activities would help my career down the road, and he gave me so much advice that choosing where to apply got a lot easier.

Interview prep after the applications were done was tailored to me, too. For example, even for introducing myself, he'd tell me what to open with. With the same material, he'd tell me what to emphasize to make it land. School by school, he'd point out what to stress to show that I'd fit. And when I actually answered the way he advised in interviews, I got good reactions.

Looking back at it all, I can feel Mr. Jung's hard work all over my entire MBA application process. I want to take this chance to thank him once more, and if you're preparing for an MBA and run into tough problems, I'd recommend working through them with Mr. Jung.

Letter #2

May 2022

I'm a working professional who studied with Mr. Jung for about a year and a half, and plan to keep doing it.

To be honest, I'd already been studying for the GMAT for a long time, on my own and at academies. But my score just wouldn't budge, no lie (560s). I was about to throw in the towel. Then quite a bit of time passed, and it wasn't until I was in my late 30s that I felt like giving it one more shot. That's how I came across Mr. Jung, through his blog. At first I'll admit his way of talking threw me off a little, it can come across a bit stiff, but I was so happy with the quality of the classes that I just kept going. Looking back, deciding not to give up and to stick with those classes has got to be one of the best decisions of my life (and honestly, I don't think there's anyone out there as down-to-earth as Mr. Jung.)

The classes that helped most were without a doubt Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning. With CR, the moment what he says clicks, you can feel your accuracy shoot up. That's exactly what happened to me. And the CR way of thinking doesn't stop at the GMAT. It widens how you approach pretty much everything you come across. People always say going abroad widens your horizon. Being in his class felt exactly like that. Things you couldn't see before start becoming visible... It's a strange experience. RC helped me a ton at work, too. My ability to read fast while still nailing what matters genuinely improved.

With that approach and his method, I took the test at the end of March 2022 and finished the GMAT with 710 (Math 49, Verbal 38). And on Analytical Writing Assessment, I got a perfect 6.0 two times in a row (I want to use this space to thank him again for teaching me to actually enjoy writing.)

In the end, I pivoted toward applying to an online MBA so I could get a degree while still working, and I didn't apply anywhere else. Now I've been admitted with a scholarship to a school that ranks in the top 3 for online MBAs in the U.S.

If anyone happens to be reading this, please, do take classes with Mr. Jung and make great results and get what you're after. I'm pretty confident there's almost no one better than him, or anywhere you can get better help. Alright, good luck everyone!

Letter #3

June 2022

Hello. I am a former student who took classes with the teacher for about half a year. I work as a semiconductor engineer, and I am currently enrolled in one of the U.S. Top 10 MBA programs.

There are academies and all kinds of other means to prepare for the GMAT and the other exams you need for graduate admissions. But I feel certain that it would be hard to find this caliber of class elsewhere, before or after test prep, and I am writing this to share an experience that felt uniquely my own.

First, the teacher does not separate test prep from MBA admissions; he demands you treat them as a single story. Before classes begin, he will sit down with you for a consultation. Naturally, most students who ask for a consultation come to him with either a vague or a concrete goal of getting into an MBA, and it is standard practice at admissions academies to exploit that desperation to get you to sign up for courses. Mr. Jung turns that premise completely on its head. He hits you with the question, "Why go to an MBA now, at the cost of such a significant opportunity cost?" Most students would either be thrown off or take offense at that, but if you give it a moment's thought, you realize that question runs in the same grain as the "Why MBA?" that you will be asked countless times by the schools you are applying to. So if you are not a student who can answer that, he takes it as a sign that you are not ready to even begin test prep, and chances are good he will send you away. On the other hand, if you can come up with an answer to that question, even if it is not polished into neat phrases, because you have been turning it over in your head, then you earn the chance to share in what is, in the shape of test prep classes, an "intellectual exchange" with him.

Second, his class is not one of those test engineering courses that only moves your score up. It is closer to a place of dialogue that builds your intellectual ability. I say "test engineering" because a typical GMAT Verbal course works like this: you encounter a problem, you recognize which memorized type it belongs to, you recall the logic that type keeps asking about, and you hunt for the answer choice that fits that logic. That is how the methodology gets divided up for SC, RC, and CR, through repeated drilling of that process. Some time has passed since I sat for the exam, so the specific types no longer come to mind, but thinking back on CR, most of the well-known instructors split CR into ten-odd types and trained a different logic for each type. His class is nothing like that. He does not care about types. He builds the ability to catch holes in the logic quickly, using only the passage and the question, all within a fixed time. This applies to RC and SC just as much. Because there is no special methodology, his class can give you a headache, and in the beginning it can be painful. But as it accumulates, you feel it fast: your GMAT score goes up, and along with it, your intellectual ability goes up, too. That carries over nicely into MBA classes, where discussion among students is front and center. MBA classes are not lectures. The essence of them is that when something the professor said in the day's topic does not sit right with you, you raise an objection, and out of that intellectual collision you carry away something useful. The intellectual circuits I sharpened in Verbal class with him have served me well there.

Third, the intellectual qualities you sense in him during the course do not stop at the GMAT. They carry over into the admissions process itself. Once test prep is done, it is time to dive into MBA admissions proper. That is where his strength, his "logic", made me admire him all over again. If you do even a little homework on MBA admissions, you find that every school asks its own set of questions, and behind them, each school has its own intangible frame of what kind of student it wants. He reads the school's questions, and from them, gauges what kind of student the school is after, and helps you tie that to your own background until you arrive at one unified story. School questions do shift from cycle to cycle, so you would think you need to brace for that every time. But if we assume you made it through the GMAT course with him, the essay process, which is the opportunity you get to have because of that, is built so that those worries get washed away cleanly.

While I was preparing my MBA applications with him, I gained knowledge that nothing else could have given me. Not just how to get into a graduate school, but what you should take away from an MBA, and, based on the career I had built up until then combined with what an MBA would give me, what kind of career I should aim for going forward. It is something I cannot put a price on, and that is why, though my writing skills are modest, I wanted to share this experience, here, briefly.

I hope that anyone out there weighing an MBA admissions journey gets to have an experience like this, just as I did.

Letter #4

April 2023

I'm writing this review on my own, because I really want other people to know about Mr. Jung. After our very first lesson, I knew he was the real thing.

I had been studying for the GMAT for a long time. You can only take the test eight times in your life, and I had three attempts left when I first contacted him.

His reply to my first message was firm. If I wanted a score in a short time, he said, I should keep studying the way I had been.

(Looking back now, I fully agree with what he told me then, that his approach takes at least 40 hours of lessons. Other academies tell you your score will go up as long as you sign up. He was honest with me from the start, and I'm really grateful for that.)

At the time I couldn't accept that I needed that many lessons, so I went and studied somewhere else. My score didn't go up on the next test either. With two attempts left, I wrote to Mr. Jung again and asked for help.

I ended up taking private GMAT lessons with him twice a week for five months, starting that November. I finished with a Verbal score of 33, eleven points higher than the 22 I got on my first test, and I was finally done with the GMAT.

His advice is aimed squarely at the test. His way of solving problems is very different from other academies and tutors. He starts with how a test taker should look at a question. As he writes on his blog, if you keep practicing, you get to a point where no question throws you off.

As a lot of other reviews say, once I got used to his way of picking apart a CR argument, I could find the answer to almost any question. (It helps a lot in everyday life too, honestly.) For RC and SC, looking closely at how the questions are built helped me solve them faster.

He also keeps looking for the way of studying that fits each student. For a few weeks he had me pick out key points and write them down in my own words, with no answer choices to lean on. That's how I finally understood what the test was really asking.

Every day he had me record myself solving problems and send him the recordings. For me this training was very useful. When I talked through my thinking out loud, I could hear exactly what I had missed. And because the lessons were one-on-one, he chose questions aimed at my weak spots, which made a big difference.

Picking out questions and sending them every day can't have been easy for him. He kept paying attention to me for five months, and I think that's why I got a better score than my level at the time.

If you're stuck on the GMAT, or on any test, please get in touch with Mr. Jung!

Letter #5

August 2024

I am a student of Mr. Jung's who will be starting at one of the top-ranked graduate schools in the United States this fall. From test prep all the way through essay writing, interviews, and the final admission, I received a great deal of help from Mr. Jung.

Because I completed my formal education in Korea, the entire U.S. graduate application process was not easy for me, and essay writing was particularly hard. With a writing score that wasn't high, and being unfamiliar with the American style of English essays, writing close to three A4 pages explaining myself effectively was a very difficult task.

Mr. Jung would point me in the right direction and ask questions that helped me write deeply and concretely, but in the early stage he would not step in. He only gave me guidelines so I could write the first draft myself. When he first told me to just go write an essay, I panicked, because I could not get a feel for how to approach it or what content to fill it with. But through sitting with it myself and going through revision after revision under his coaching, I gradually picked up the craft of essay writing. He guided me well to build it around the episodes that best showed who I am, without being wordy, logical, and persuasive.

This process helped a great deal in letting me tell my real story and letting my personality come through in the writing, and once the rough structure was in place, he paid attention down to the small details to bring the writing to a higher level of completeness.

Beyond the applications themselves, he shared tips and information on how to leave a good impression, like emailing admissions officers, and I was able to make the points that made me stand out from other applicants something concrete. He also coached me carefully on how to answer strategically, one by one, every question from admissions and every question that came up during the process. For interview prep, he grouped the likely questions into patterns and prepared me so I could answer a range of questions effectively using a few examples that brought out my strengths. At first, getting interviewed in English for about 40 minutes felt like a burden, but through repeated pattern practice with Mr. Jung, I was able to get rid of my fear of interviews, and since I could not suddenly raise my English ability in that short a time, I think that approach let me prepare for the interviews that kept coming efficiently within a tight schedule.

What helped me as much as the coaching during this application process was his passion and his ability to keep me motivated. I had been preparing for graduate school for no short period of time. It took a long time just to get test scores good enough to apply, and since I had never lived abroad for a long stretch, I felt my English was weaker than most people's, too. There were certainly moments when I felt drained and it was hard, and every time that happened, Mr. Jung encouraged me, gave me assignments so I would not slack off, and with as much passion as any student, thought along with me about how to stand out and bring out my strengths. I genuinely believe his help was a big part of why I could keep going without giving up to the very end.

His classes were not simply for the test. They were a precious time in which I could understand how people in the English-speaking world, so different from Korea, think, write, and structure their writing, and at the same time, a time that made me think about what I should value, what I should learn, and how I should set myself apart, going forward in grad school and out in the working world. He impressed on me that graduate school is a process, not a result, and that even after I enroll, I have to keep building my real abilities on my own, including studying English.

I am deeply grateful to Mr. Jung, and I hope that many more students going forward receive his help, and without giving up, push through to the very end, and achieve the results they want.

Thank you.

Letter #6

July 2025

I first learned of Mr. Jung back in 2020, and after a long wait, I finally took his class for a year starting in 2023. I'm writing this recommendation with a heart full of thanks to Mr. Jung, who woke me up to not just the GMAT, but a way of critical thinking, and a way of looking at the world.

As it says right on his blog, his class is not one that makes you grind through problem after problem. He doesn't hand you any formulas, either. Instead, through his own question-and-answer method, he makes you internalize what questions to ask, and when. Along the way, I imagine more than a few people might find themselves thrown off. That's because this is not the soft, gentle feedback you get from teachers at ordinary academies or tutoring. At times he is blunt, and he shatters our habitual way of thinking, and he does it hard. And in his class, if you skip the homework even once, you're out. So you absolutely have to do it, diligently, no matter what.

Through his classes, I gained a great deal not just for the GMAT, but for how I think in everyday life. When I come across some phenomenon or piece of information, I've become able to turn a healthy curiosity on it, and I can think far more freely than I ever could before.

Whether your worry is MBA admissions, or the way of thinking that a person of intellect ought to carry, going into his class is something I recommend strongly.

Letter #7

July 2025

The thing that stood out most to me over three years of taking his class is that the teacher cares about something bigger than just prepping for a test. He sees studying as something with a vision to it. Before you even start preparing for a test, he has you learn how Americans structure their thinking and build an argument. How do you develop a topic creatively? What kind of structure do you speak or write in so that Americans take it as something they actually want to listen to? He builds the class so that way of doing things becomes second nature.

So if you're a student hoping to pull a score out in a month or two using templates you can memorize, this class might not be for you. But for students who want to actually learn American logic structure and survive in an actual American university, I think this is the most practically helpful class there is.

He also shatters the vague fantasy of an American university and wakes me up, every single class, to what I, as a Korean, would need to change in my way of thinking, and to the fact that studying English is never something to take lightly. Especially whenever I started slacking off, he'd make me rethink the very essence of studying English and the attitude I bring to it, in a way that was firm but warm, and thanks to that, my posture toward studying naturally changed, too.

Over those three years, through his classes, I actually learned how to think, and little by little, I gained a way of seeing the world that's different from most people's. And as my ability to organize my thoughts logically and get them across accurately grew, those moments where I'd lie in bed before falling asleep regretting, "Why couldn't I have said that then?" started noticeably dropping off.

Through all of this, I didn't just get better at English. I grew a lot in my whole way of thinking and my attitude toward learning. He's the kind of teacher who leads students, past the test, to actually think for themselves, speak logically, and find their own voice even in unfamiliar surroundings. So I confidently recommend him. He's a rare teacher, and exactly the one you need if you're a student who's looking for something beyond a test score.

Letter #8

July 2025

I studied with Mr. Jung for about two and a half years, preparing for the GRE, the TOEFL, and everything else a U.S. PhD application needs (SOP, CV, and interviews). I'm about to leave for the States, and when I look back on those years, the most important thing I learned comes down to this.

"There is no secret to doing well on a test. What matters is thinking clearly and well, and then putting those thoughts into English. You have to keep practicing both for the rest of your life."

His class won't help you "master" English in a short time. (No class can do that.) It gives people like me, who don't speak English as a first language, a clear idea of how to keep studying for life, and it keeps you moving in that direction. Of course, that only works if you actually do the homework he gives you.

Like a lot of people getting ready to study abroad, I started with GRE classes at big-name academies in Korea. We memorized question banks and templates. My score went up a little, but I still needed a higher one, and I didn't feel my English getting any better.

Then one day I started to wonder. Say I somehow got a high score this way and got into a PhD program. Would that mean my English was actually good? Could I get through five years in another country, doing everything in English?

The academy classes were the same explanations of past test passages over and over, so no matter how long I kept going, I wasn't learning anything new. It felt more like I was paying tuition to buy practice questions.

Mr. Jung's class started from a different place. Instead of explaining one passage at a time, he taught the basic logic that runs through many passages. Articles on very different topics can look like they have nothing in common, and in his class I came to see that most of them are built on the same logical structure. Once I saw that, it helped with a lot more than reading. It carried over to writing, my application essays, and getting ready for interviews. For example, I learned that two pieces with the same structure can read very differently. How you arrange the content and which details you add decide whether a reader wants to keep going. That gave me a real, practical sense of how to write better.

A test is just one format. What really counts is how clearly you can organize your own thinking and how convincingly you can say it in English. So what I struggled with most in his class was coming up with good ideas in the first place, even more than the English itself. He came back to this in every class, and it built the kind of ability I could use for the GRE, the TOEFL, and my interviews.

Admissions, 2023–2026

Schools where my clients were admitted. I've left out years and programs to protect their privacy.

Arizona State University, Tempe
Boston College
Brooklyn College
Caltech
Carnegie Mellon University
Columbia University
Cornell University
Dartmouth College
Harvard University
MIT
Nanyang Technological University
Northwestern University
Stanford University(2)
UC Berkeley
University of British Columbia
University of Chicago(3)
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign(2)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor(2)
University of Pennsylvania(2)
University of Virginia(4)
Yale University(2)

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