Meet Our Academic Counseling Team!

Anna Ivey

Born and raised in Germany, Anna Ivey attended Phillips Academy Andover (Massachusetts) for high school, earned her B.A. in History from Columbia University in New York, spent her Junior year at Cambridge University in the U.K., and earned her law degree at the University of Chicago.

In law school, she served as an editor of The University of Chicago Law Review,worked as a research assistant to Larry Lessig with a focus on constitutional and cyberspace law, and took several classes at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Upon graduating from law school, she joined the Corporate Group at the Los Angeles law firm Irell & Manella, working with clients such as Disney, AOL Time Warner, Williams-Sonoma, Hewlett-Packard, CSFB, and Mattel in mergers and acquisitions, securities law, and public and private financings. She later joined the Entertainment Finance Group at Gipson Hoffman & Pancione, also in Los Angeles, where she worked on the financing of major motion pictures starring actors such as Samuel L. Jackson, Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Kevin Spacey, and Renee Zellweger.

She next returned to the University of Chicago Law School, where at age 27 she was promoted to Dean of Admissions. She decided who got in... and who didn't. She read thousands of applications, visited colleges nationwide, educated tens of thousands of applicants about the admissions process, and conducted hundreds of admissions interviews. As part of a larger community of admissions professionals, she also met regularly with law school, business school, and college admissions officers from top schools.

Anna has been featured as an expert on CNN and Fox News Channel, and in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Business Journal, Fortune.com, and Smart Money. She speaks at colleges and workplaces around the country and publishes ‘The Ivey Files,’ a blog for high school students and twenty-somethings navigating life, work, and school.

The author of The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions, she is currently at work on her next book, Gen Y @ Work, as well as a guide to U.S. college admisssions for the Korean market. Anna serves as a board member of AIGAC, the Association of International Graduate School Admissions Consultants (view our principles of good practice here).

Natively biilingual in German and English, her language studies have also included French, Polish, Latin, Greek, Aramaic, and Mandarin Chinese.

Marlena Corcoran

Marlena Corcoran studied for two years at the École normale supérieure in Paris and holds a Ph.D. in English from Brown University. She has held research appointments at Harvard, Princeton, and Brown Universities, and at Wolfson College, Oxford. She has many years' experience teaching and has also worked in the business world. In 2004, she published two novels designed to help non-native speakers improve their English. In 2003, she received an award from Brown for her work with the international community. Marlena speaks fluent German and French in addition to her native English.

Marlena works with college applicants, college students, applicants to masters and Ph.D. programs, and fellowship applicants.

Christine Foster

As a former reporter for Forbes magazine in New York and Silicon Valley, Christine wrote articles on business and education-related issues, including privatization of school lunch programs and a cover story on school vouchers. She has also worked for newspapers in Syracuse, Virginia Beach, Philadelphia, and Wichita, as well for Stanford's alumni magazine, Stanford. One of her feature stories, on homeschoolers admitted to Stanford, continues to make the rounds on the internet seven years after publication.

A native of Manhattan Beach in Southern California, Christine was lured to Philadelphia to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where she spent the majority of her time working, first as a reporter, then as managing editor, for The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn's award-winning newspaper. There she covered beats ranging from crime to the admissions office. In her spare time, she earned a bachelor of arts with honors in American History. Today, she lives in Silicon Valley with her husband and three children.

Jennifer Lee

Jennifer spent eleven years as a cello student at Juilliard before attending Harvard College, where she played varsity lacrosse and double majored in Music and Anthropology. She graduated magna cum laude and next earned her M.Phil. in Musicology and Performance at Oxford (Lincoln College). She currently attends Harvard Business School for her MBA. She spent a year at a music conservatory in Freiburg, Germany, and her solo and ensemble performances have taken her to France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, and South Korea. Most recently, she has worked at JP Morgan in London as an investment banking summer associate in the Technology, Media, and Telecom Group. Jennifer is conversant in German and Korean.