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Every student works directly with all three founders: Lara, Marah and Jorge. We never outsource your student’s mentorship or assign it to other mentors. All three of us share responsibility for your child’s progress and meet every week to discuss their development, challenges and next steps.

We’ll walk you through the exact structure for your child’s program during the consultation depending on the program that is most suitable for them.

Every program starts with an in depth assessment of your child’s strengths, interests and goals, followed by a personalized strategy and a prioritized plan. In the first stage of the program, that includes:

Understanding your child (first weeks)

• Three assessments: the CliftonStrengths assessment (administered and interpreted by Marah), a Values Exploration assessment, and an Intellectual Vitality assessment of your child’s interests and thinking patterns.
• Student Insight Report: brings together your child’s strengths, values, interests, thinking patterns and growth areas in one document.
• Personal Program Blueprint: the plan that guides academic focus, extracurriculars, skill development and the early shape of their application story.
• Action Plan and Accountability System: clear next steps, with regular check ins to keep them on track.
• Success Skills Plan, where needed: support for organization, motivation or executive functioning.

Developing depth (throughout the program)

• The Ivy Lab: our signature exploration program, where your child investigates fields, real world problems and opportunities that match their interests.
• Focused Workshops: hands on practice in research, writing, communication, leadership and critical thinking.
• Strategy and Synthesis Sessions: ongoing one to one sessions that connect what your child is learning to their next decisions.
• Wellbeing and Performance Reviews: every two weeks, Marah reviews stress, habits and productivity with your child.

Staying connected (throughout the program)

• The Ivy Centre app: one place where students and parents can follow your child’s plan, see upcoming steps and stay in touch with us between sessions.
• Ongoing communication by email and online messaging: questions don’t have to wait for the next session, and parents stay informed at every stage, not just at milestones.

Looking ahead

As your child gets closer to application season, we begin shaping their college list and application strategy. That leads into Application Architecture, where all three founders plan each application before any writing begins.

The depth of founder time and one to one work depends on the program (Collaborative, Individual or Signature). We’ll walk you through exactly what your child’s program includes during the consultation.

No. The strongest applications come from genuine interests developed with depth. We help students find what they truly care about and grow it into meaningful work, rather than collecting activities for a résumé.

Yes. We mentor students around the world, including at American curriculum and international schools. We understand how admissions officers read applications from different school systems, and we tailor the strategy to your child’s context, whatever it is.

The earlier a student starts, the more options remain open, especially for activities and coursework. That said, we work with students at every stage, from early high school through senior year, and we’ll be honest about what can still be done with the time available.

Before establishing The Ivy Centre, we had firsthand experience working with and being clients of other companies and organizations in the college admissions consulting industry. This gave us extensive insight into how different mentorship and consulting models operate, where they succeed, and where they fall short.

We recognized that each model offers meaningful strengths, but also has inherent limitations, often arising from how the services themselves are structured rather than the qualifications or capabilities of the individuals delivering them.

For example:

• The Former Admissions Officer Model: This model is built around firsthand knowledge of how admissions committees evaluate applicants and make decisions. While valuable, knowing what makes an application competitive is not the same as knowing how to strategically develop one for a particular student. Understanding how an application is evaluated does not necessarily translate into knowing how to identify a student's unique strengths and weaknesses, determine which opportunities to pursue, or build a cohesive strategy that maximizes their admissions potential. Furthermore, because this model draws primarily on careers built within university admissions, it may offer a narrower perspective on the professional opportunities students ultimately hope to pursue. The strongest strategic decisions are not always those that simply look impressive on a college application. They are often those that simultaneously develop meaningful skills, strengthen a student's candidacy, and create opportunities for future internships, graduate school admissions, and competitive careers. In our perspective, building an application that earns admission and helping a student build the foundation for long term success should not be treated as separate objectives.
• The Peer Mentor and Recent Graduate Model: This model emphasizes relatability and guidance from individuals who have recently succeeded in the admissions process themselves. These mentors are often exceptionally talented students and graduates, but having successfully navigated one's own admissions journey is not the same as having the experience to develop and execute a strategy for someone with entirely different circumstances. What worked for one student may not work for another, and developing individualized strategies requires both experience across diverse student profiles and the professional judgment to recognize which decisions will have the greatest impact. Because many peer mentors are still pursuing their own graduate education or building careers in other fields, mentorship is many times just a secondary professional commitment or a way to supplement income. This can result in a more conversational or reactive approach, rather than a structured program with clearly defined objectives, actionable next steps, consistent follow through, and accountability for progress. Additionally, mentors who have not yet established their own professional careers may have limited firsthand insight into how today's academic and extracurricular decisions translate into internships, graduate education, and competitive career opportunities.
• The Large Firm and Specialized Team Model: This model brings together consultants with different areas of expertise, often assigning specialists to different components of a student's journey. While this provides access to a broad range of knowledge, having multiple specialists involved is not necessarily the same as having multiple perspectives working collaboratively toward one cohesive strategy. When responsibilities are divided among different consultants, each may develop expertise in a particular aspect of the application without developing a sufficiently deep understanding of the student as a whole. This can lead to fragmented recommendations, missed connections between academic choices, extracurricular development, personal interests, and application narratives, and limited continuity as a student's goals evolve. The model can also prioritize expertise in managing admissions processes over firsthand experience with the competitive professional paths students may ultimately wish to pursue. Finally, scale introduces an important structural challenge: maintaining consistent mentorship quality, meaningful collaboration, and genuine personal attention becomes increasingly difficult as the number of consultants and students grows. A highly personalized mentorship experience depends not simply on how many experts are available, but on how well those experts know each student, how closely they work together, and how much responsibility they personally take for the student's progress.

One of our central goals in establishing The Ivy Centre was to develop a mentorship model that would preserve the strengths of these different approaches while addressing their respective structural gaps.

That is why we created our Triple Consultant Model, in which every student works directly with all three Ivy League-graduate founders, each contributing a distinct and complementary area of expertise.

• Lara, with a background in engineering and elite management consulting, brings structured problem solving, strategic planning, and analytical rigor.
• Marah, with her expertise in psychology and human development, helps students better understand themselves, their motivations, their strengths, and the direction they want to pursue.
• Jorge, with his background in medicine, research, and the humanities, brings an interdisciplinary perspective to intellectual development, academic exploration, and long term professional aspirations.

Rather than dividing a student's journey into separate responsibilities managed by different consultants, we work collaboratively throughout the entire process. We meet every week to discuss each student's development, progress, challenges, and emerging opportunities, ensuring that our recommendations are informed by all three perspectives and remain connected from one stage to the next.

The result is a mentorship experience in which students benefit from three complementary areas of expertise without sacrificing continuity, personal attention, or a cohesive strategy.

This level of personal involvement naturally limits the number of students we can mentor each year. We consider that a deliberate and necessary choice, rather than a limitation we need to overcome.

Our mentorship also extends beyond college admissions. Each of us has built a successful, highly compensated career outside the admissions industry, in fields that many of our students ultimately aspire to enter themselves. This gives us the ability to offer firsthand insight into the academic choices, skills, experiences, and professional opportunities that can shape a student's path long after college acceptance. Whether a student is interested in the most competitive companies in management consulting, finance, medicine, research, or other competitive fields, we help them understand what these paths actually involve based on our personal experiences, including how to prepare for them, and which decisions made today may open doors in the future. Our goal is not simply to help students gain admission to an exceptional university, but to help them make the most of the opportunities that education is intended to create.

Our published admissions results cover the last five admission cycles and are calculated from our internal records for students we advised end to end on US undergraduate applications. We don’t publish applicant counts or share individual student records with third party companies to verify those figures, even when identifying details have been removed. During a consultation, we can explain how we would approach your child’s situation without disclosing another student’s private information.

No. Admissions decisions are made independently by universities, and no consultant can control an institution's priorities, the strength of its applicant pool, or the final decision on any individual student. We would never ask a family to place its trust in a promise that no one can responsibly make, and we strongly encourage families to approach anyone who claims otherwise with a healthy degree of skepticism.

What we do guarantee is our commitment to the quality of our mentorship and the work we deliver. We help students make informed decisions, identify and develop their strengths, address weaknesses in their profiles, and build applications that clearly communicate who they are, what they have accomplished, and where they hope to go.

We also stand behind our work financially. Every family receives a full money back guarantee during an introductory period of two or four weeks, depending on the student's stage in the admissions journey. The applicable period is clearly specified in the contract and confirmed before enrollment. If your family decides during that period that The Ivy Centre is not the right fit, we refund 100% of what you have paid.

Our guarantee reflects our confidence in the quality of our work and our commitment to earning your family's trust, not a promise of admission, which ultimately remains entirely at the discretion of each university.

Our Collaborative Mentorship starts at $15,000. Our pricing reflects the value of our expertise and the time we personally dedicate to each student. We’ll give you a complete, all inclusive breakdown for the program that best suits your child, including what is and isn’t covered, so there are no surprises later.

Every family receives a full money back guarantee during an introductory period of two or four weeks, depending on the student’s stage in the admissions journey. The applicable period is specified in the contract and confirmed before enrollment. If your family cancels within it, we refund 100% of what you have paid, no questions asked. If your family decides later on that we’re not the right fit, your contract’s progressive refund schedule applies. We’ll walk you through it during the consultation.

Not at all. Even with November and January deadlines ahead, there is still a lot that can change the outcome: a sharper college list, a clear strategy for each application, and essays that show who your child really is. We’ll focus on what will make the biggest difference with the time left, and all three founders review every application before it’s submitted.

It depends on what you and your family want the support to achieve. If the student and family only want help with one specific task, a focused service may be enough. We don’t offer one-off essay reviews or punctual services, because we are not a college admissions company. We are a mentorship company. Our purpose is to help young people become extraordinary adults: curious, capable and clear about the impact they want to have, and, above all, fulfilled. Admission to top universities follows from that work, but it is not the only goal.

That is why our mentorship is a continuing relationship. Our Collaborative Mentorship starts at $15,000. All three founders are directly involved and share responsibility for the student’s progress. We meet every week to discuss each student’s development in detail, challenges and next steps, and that thinking shapes every conversation, plan and piece of feedback the student receives.

In fact, our purpose and commitment to impact goes beyond the families we work with. For every student whose family invests in our mentorship, we mentor a high-potential student who could not otherwise afford it, free of charge.

Similar published results don’t always describe similar services - and numbers are not usually directly comparable. Even if they were, programs differ in whom they accept, which outcomes they count and how much support they provide. The more useful question is who will work with the student, and how deeply.

At The Ivy Centre, that is always the three of us, founders. We are Ivy League graduates with STEM backgrounds who built successful careers in fields that reward expertise highly: Lara in elite management consulting, Marah in psychology and human development, and Jorge in medicine. We did not build The Ivy Centre to supplement our incomes, and we do not grow by assigning students to other mentors. Lara and Marah lead the business full time, and Jorge is directly involved and personally invested in every student’s mentorship alongside his medical practice. We designed and constantly improve the program ourselves, we know it inside out, and we give each student the thought and time they deserve.

Our pricing is determined exclusively by the value of our expertise and the time we personally dedicate to each student. Over the years, we have continuously refined our approach to eliminate unnecessary inefficiencies, which can be particularly common in smaller, boutique organizations. We are confident, however, that The Ivy Centre operates at a level of efficiency that few, even among the very best in our industry, can match. We never outsource our students’ mentorship to third parties, and we have designed and developed our internal systems ourselves, drawing on our backgrounds and expertise in STEM to build processes that are both highly efficient and tailored to the work we do.

Each of us has built a successful, highly compensated career outside college admissions mentorship, with opportunities to continue advancing in fields such as elite management consulting, finance (including investment banking and private equity), and medicine (including private medical practice). We chose to dedicate our time to mentoring students instead. We did not enter this field to supplement our income, nor because we lacked other professional opportunities. We made a deliberate choice to pursue work we are passionate about and whose purpose we believe deeply in. And having made that choice, we are committed to doing it exceptionally well.

Doing that sustainably means valuing our work the same way the world’s most competitive and best-paying employers would. The Ivy Centre is founder-led: everyone who mentors your student is an owner of the company. That is how we keep this level of expertise in every student’s mentorship as we grow.

It is the same expectation parents likely hold for their own children: that their education, skills, expertise, and time will one day be valued for what they are truly worth. We simply hold ourselves to that same standard. And ultimately, what no other company can offer is access to these three founders and mentors specifically, with the unique combination of expertise, experience, and personal commitment that each of us brings to every student we mentor.