Jake Zukowski

Thank you for your swift response time and the valuable video feedback. Your positivity was quite motivational.

Jake was a fantastic mentor – knowledgeable, friendly, with great enthusiasm. He was also brilliant at linking the course content to the bigger picture and thinking about how it could help me progress in my career.

I'm very new to UX relative to most folks in the Cohort, and Jake spotted that quality right away and was able to pivot feedback to address my challenges broadly, from my lack of understand or misunderstanding about UX broadly as a discipline, as well as specific challenges I was facing with OOUX and the ORCA process.  He was also just a really fantastic professional mentor -- he really went above and beyond with the help and feedback he gave me. In our last mentoring session, I told him how I wanted to keep going with OOUX  -- I'm *hooked*! But how I wasn't really sure how to build a portfolio. I usually do animation work for non-profits with my students, and sort of mulled that with him and he just spun it right back and me and it turned into this amazing, creatively inspiring brainstorming session.  I know have 3 projects (well 4, really, because I want to keep going with mid- and high fidelity with Driftwood Alchemy!) that I'm super pumped to pursue using this philosophy, across a range of applications. Jake has been incredibly encouraging every step of the way, while also giving clear and honest feedback on room for improvement. As a teacher of 20 years, I know good teaching when I see it -- Jake does this (as do you, Sophia!) and he balances the constructive criticism with creative encouragement like the pro he is. A gem, that one.

Thanks Jake for timely constructive feedback on my assignments. These allowed me to continue without long times of doubting on how to proceed. I liked a lot your feedback as short video as you used it effectively to show things.  

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I feel incredibly fortunate to have worked with Jake as my mentor. His guidance was the perfect balance of encouragement and challenge—celebrating strong ideas while gently showing me where I could approach things more efficiently or thoughtfully. What truly set Jake apart was how he pushed me beyond traditional ‘designer questions’ and encouraged me to think like a founder. That shift was transformative. Applying his advice in practice led to outcomes that exceeded my expectations. Jake’s mentorship has been both motivating and deeply valuable.

I loved having personal sessions with my mentor, they were imperative to my understanding of the OOUX and ORCA process. Jake was fantastic and I enjoyed working through my questions with him, and it was great to go back and forth and think about what would be the best path for my version of the project, and he even helped walk me through an assignment that I was stuck on.