Mentor Network · Faculty Roster
The people who actually teach this are the people who actually do the work.
Every student at IWTD I is paired with a working senior designer — never a generic instructor. Below: the named mentors who lead our current cohort, the design rooms they come from, and how a 1:8 ratio turns into a real working relationship across twelve weeks.
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Lead mentor Priya Achebe, Principal Designer at Figma, running a Wednesday crit with Cohort 14.
Six of sixty-four
A working faculty, named out loud.
We publish our mentors the way magazines publish mastheads — by name, current employer, and the program track they lead. Below is a sample of the senior designers currently teaching across our UX/UI, Product, and Graphic Design certificates.
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01
David Park
Co-founder & Faculty Director
Cooper alumnus and former IDEO design lead. Teaches the opening Design Research studio and leads weekly portfolio crits across all three tracks. Co-authored IWTD I's product design curriculum.
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02
Priya Achebe
Principal Designer · Figma
Leads the Figma Systems and Variables deep-dive for the UX/UI track. Students ship a real plugin spec by week ten, reviewed directly by Priya and one of her Figma colleagues.
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03
Marcus Hollander
Senior Product Designer · Airbnb
Runs the Product Design capstone and the end-of-program hiring-panel simulation. Marcus reviews every student's final case study before it ships to the external portfolio review.
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04
Mariana Holcomb
Co-founder & Design Strategy Lead
Former IDEO design lead and founder of IWTD I. Mentors the Graphic Design track and personally runs the biannual mentor-onboarding studio, which every senior mentor attends before joining a cohort.
Sixty more mentors lead cohorts across our three certificate programs. Request the full roster by emailing [email protected].
Curation · Not recruitment
Sixty-four mentors is a small number on purpose.
Most online programs advertise their instructor count. We advertise the opposite — a deliberately small, deliberately senior network, hand-picked by two people who have hired designers at IDEO and Cooper and know what a real portfolio critique sounds like.
Every mentor who joins the network has been through the same funnel. Mariana Holcomb and David Park review portfolios, conduct a teaching simulation with a current cohort, and sit in on two live crit sessions before a contract is signed. The bar is not "has designed for ten years" — it is "still designs, still ships, and can explain why a decision was made to someone who has never made one."
Mentors are matched 1:8 to students not by availability but by track, portfolio ambition, and weekly time-zone overlap. A student building a fintech case study is not paired with a mentor whose current work is in healthcare. The match is mechanical, visible, and locked in by week one — so the rest of the twelve weeks is spent on the work, not on logistics.
— Mariana Holcomb & David Park, Co-founders
The network, by the numbers
- 64 Contracted senior designer mentors Across all three certificate tracks
- 11 Average years of industry experience Verified against LinkedIn & portfolio review
- 1 : 8 Mentor-to-student ratio, every cohort Locked at intake, not adjusted mid-program
- 14 Cohorts supported since 2019 Across UX/UI, Product, and Graphic Design
The pairing, week by week
How a 1:8 ratio becomes a working relationship.
Mentor pairing is not an algorithm and not a lottery. It is a four-step process that begins the moment you are accepted and runs through your final portfolio crit.
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Step 01
Intake survey, week zero
Within five business days of acceptance you complete a 40-minute survey covering your portfolio ambition, current skill gaps, target employer type, and weekly availability. This is reviewed by your track lead and the faculty director.
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Step 02
Track & industry alignment
The faculty director matches you to a mentor whose current work sits in your target industry — fintech students with fintech mentors, brand systems students with brand systems mentors — and who can hold your timezone within a two-hour window.
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Step 03
Kickoff call, week one
Your mentor runs a 45-minute kickoff in week one. You agree on the two case studies you will ship by week twelve, the weekly crit cadence, and the standing office-hours slot. The agreement is written down and signed by both sides.
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Step 04
Weekly critique, weeks two through twelve
You meet your mentor weekly for a live crit — never async-only. By week ten your mentor is co-reviewing your portfolio with an external hiring director from our 40+ member panel, so your final case studies are seen by two senior eyes before graduation day.
Where these mentors work · Where our graduates interview first
The design rooms our mentors come from — and our graduates move into.
Plus 380+ agencies who interview IWTD I graduates first, including in-house design hiring partners Shopify and Atlassian.
Apply for the Next Cohort