NOT YOUR STANDARD ABOUT US PAGE

Before The Ivy Centre, there was a much earlier plan to teach

Lara thought she would become a math teacher.

Long before college admissions, consulting, engineering, or entrepreneurship entered the picture, education already had her attention.

She competed in the Brazilian Mathematics Olympiads and, by sixth grade, was already mentoring tens of students in and out of school.

Teaching was not something she discovered after building a career. It was one of the first ways she understood what she loved doing.

Helping someone understand something they could not see before felt meaningful very early.

ANOTHER WARNING: THIS STORY STARTS WITH COLLEGE ADMISSIONS. IT DOES NOT STAY THERE FOR VERY LONG.

Teaching was always a part of the plan

Portrait of Lara David

We are not trying to create students who look extraordinary on paper. We are helping students become people with something extraordinary to put on it.”

THE IVY CENTRE

EDUCATION AS A CONSTANT

Teaching was always part of Lara's life. But she wanted to do it differently.

The route to teaching just became less conventional than she expected.

Lara never stopped wanting to teach. She just kept following her curiosity, questions, opportunities, and experiences that would eventually shape how she did it.

Lara David is the Founder of The Ivy Centre, a Columbia-trained Civil and Environmental Engineer, former Boston Consulting Group (BCG) consultant, published researcher, entrepreneur, nonprofit founder, and educator.

... Those experiences may look unrelated at first. But to Lara, they never were.

Engineering taught her how to break complicated problems into parts. Research taught her how to turn questions into rigorous investigations, evaluate evidence, and find answers she could defend.

Almost 4 years of consulting at BCG taught her how to solve complex, high stakes problems, identify the decisions that could materially change an outcome, and turn strategy into measurable results across multimillion dollar transformations for Fortune 100 companies. It also taught her how to shape narratives around those decisions, synthesize complexity into a clear point of view, and influence C-suite stakeholders around the path forward.

Entrepreneurship taught her what happens when no one gives you the roadmap and you have to build one yourself.

Each path gave her something she would eventually bring back to the work she had wanted to do all along.

BUT EDUCATION GAVE THESE TOOLS A PURPOSE

Editorial collage about Lara David's path through education

Lara David at Columbia University

WHERE THE IDEA CAME FROM

Mentorship was never a career detour.

Lara has always been drawn to people: what motivates them, what they care about, what they are capable of, and what so often prevents young adults from seeing that possibility in themselves.

For the last 11 years, Lara has mentored students in the United States and abroad through admission to some of the US most selective universities. Working with hundreds of students across their academic, personal, and professional development, she began to notice patterns that extended far beyond admissions.

While some students arrived already extraordinarily ambitious, others had remarkable potential but had not yet learned how to recognize it, develop it, or trust it.

Above all, what stayed with Lara was not simply where those students were eventually admitted. It was what happened when the right combination of belief, challenge, strategy, and opportunity changed the way a young adult saw themselves.

Over time, she watched students become more confident in their judgement, more willing to pursue difficult opportunities, more comfortable asking ambitious questions, and more capable of making decisions without waiting for someone else to tell them what to do.

The relationships with students and parents rarely ended with admission. Students returned with decisions about internships, research, careers, graduate school, entrepreneurship, and what they wanted to build next.

The question was no longer whether teaching would remain part of Lara’s life. It became what teaching could look like if she brought everything else she had learned into it:

What should exceptional youth mentorship look like?

If we do our job well, students should leave us more capable of navigating their own lives, not more dependent on us to navigate them.”

THAT BELIEF EVENTUALLY BECAME THE FOUNDATION OF THE IVY CENTRE.

WHY THE IVY CENTRE HAD TO BE DIFFERENT

Years of mentoring made something increasingly difficult to ignore...

The industry was often solving for the application before understanding the student.

Lara has seen admissions from nearly every side of the table.

Her perspective on college admissions was not shaped only by advising students. She had also experienced the process from the other side, as the student receiving the advice.

For her own undergraduate applications, Lara’s family hired a college admissions consulting firm. She never forgot what it felt like to entrust such an important part of her future to someone else, or the uncertainty, pressure, and vulnerability that came with it.

Later, between 2015 and 2019, Lara worked inside both nonprofit and commercial admissions organizations. This time, she saw the process from within: how different organizations advised students, where mentorship could genuinely change a trajectory, and where conventional college advising models fell short of the depth, strategy, and sustained investment she believed students deserved.

Years later, she began thinking about the same process from a third perspective: the parent she might one day become.

Three perspectives that shaped the model

Taken together, those three perspectives revealed a recurring problem. College advising often began with the outputs of the process rather than the person behind them. Activities to add. Colleges to target. Essays to write. Milestones to complete. Lara wanted to reverse that order and begin with the student.

1. WHO IS THIS STUDENT BECOMING?
2. WHAT COULD BECOME GENUINELY DISTINCTIVE ABOUT THEM?
3. AND WHICH EXPERIENCES ARE ACTUALLY WORTH PURSUING, WHETHER OR NOT AN ADMISSIONS OFFICER EVER SEES THEM?

Families are being asked to make consequential decisions about their children with little visibility into what actually differentiated one model of college advising from another.

The Ivy Centre was built to do the opposite: understand each student deeply, then build the strategy around them.

FROM ONE VISION TO THREE PERSPECTIVES

One person imagined the standard. Three perspectives are bringing it to life.

The Ivy Centre began with Lara’s vision for what youth mentorship could become. But building an organization around the whole student required something Lara believed just as strongly:

No single mentor should assume they can understand every dimension of another human being alone.

That conviction brought Marah Selim and Jorge Dorantes, MD into the work. They did not join The Ivy Centre simply to add credentials to an admissions team. Each brought a perspective Lara could not replicate herself.

• Marah brought the science of human development.
• Jorge brought an expansive model of excellence across disciplines.
• Lara brought strategy, education, research, entrepreneurship, and more than a decade of mentorship.

Together, they began turning one philosophy into something broader and more rigorous than anyone of them could have built alone.

The Ivy Centre began with one idea of what mentorship could be. It became stronger when that idea was challenged, expanded, and rebuilt through three different ways of seeing a student.

The Ivy Centre

FOUNDER-LED, BY DESIGN

The people who built the model are the people who mentor the student.

At The Ivy Centre, founder-led is not a branding statement. It describes how the company actually operates.

Every student works directly with Lara, Marah, and Jorge, the three people responsible for shaping the philosophy, standards, and direction of The Ivy Centre.

The thinking is not developed at the top and then handed down for someone else to deliver.

The people setting the standard remain accountable for the work itself.

That means the founders know the students.

• They know the conversations that came before.
• They know why decisions were made.
• They know where a student has struggled.
• They know what has changed.
• They know what the larger strategy is trying to accomplish.

And because all three remain close to the work, they can challenge one another, refine the approach, and respond when circumstances evolve.

That is also why The Ivy Centre deliberately works with a limited number of students.

Founder-led mentorship only means something if the founders actually have the time to mentor.

MEET THE FOUNDERS

Hey! We're Lara, Marah, and Jorge!

We’re the three founders of The Ivy Centre and graduates of Columbia and Cornell. And when we say we mentor our students and that we are founder-led by design, we mean it: every student works directly with all 3 of us throughout their journey. Lara is a Civil and Environmental Engineer and former BCG management consultant, Marah is a Counseling Psychology PhD candidate, and Jorge is a practicing physician and surgeon.

Our backgrounds have opened doors to many different careers, but we came together to build The Ivy Centre because education is our true passion. Each of us has experienced its power to change lives, and we want to help many more ambitious students access those possibilities.

Founded in 2020, The Ivy Centre was built around a different model of college admissions mentorship. Rather than assigning a student to a single advisor, every student is mentored directly by all three founders. Lara brings the structured, analytical thinking of engineering and management consulting; Marah brings a deeper understanding of psychology, self knowledge, and student development; and Jorge brings the perspective of a physician, educator, and lifelong multidisciplinary learner.

Together, those perspectives allow us to understand each student more comprehensively and develop a strategy that reflects both the strength of their candidacy and the individual behind it.

As seen on Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, and National Post

ADMISSIONS WAS NEVER THE FINISH LINE

We care where our students go. We care even more about what they do once they get there.

Those conversations are not outside the work. They are the reason for it.

None of the three founders believes mentorship should expire when an acceptance letter arrives.

Students return during college with new questions.

Lara, Marah, and Jorge have continued mentoring students through recruiting, internships, entrepreneurship, graduate education, and the beginning of their careers.

The specific opportunity changes. The deeper question rarely does.

We measure mentorship not simply by where a student is admitted, but by what they eventually learn to do with the opportunities in front of them.

A COMMUNITY THAT GROWS WITH YOU

Over time, mentorship becomes a community

Your questions evolve, but the relationships often stay. Students return during college and years later, families keep in touch, and former students introduce younger siblings, friends, and classmates.

RELATIONSHIPS THAT CONTINUE

Conversations that begin around college grow into discussions about internships, graduate school, careers, and entrepreneurship.

MORE THAN A COLLEGE DESTINATION

You become part of a network of students, families, mentors, alumni, and friends who share what they learn and remain invested in one another’s success.

A community thoughtful about what it pursues, generous with what it learns and invested in seeing you succeed.

THE WORLD IS YOURS

College is one chapter. We cannot wait to see what you write next.

The goal was never simply to help students get somewhere extraordinary. It was to help them recognize what becomes possible once they arrive, pursue those possibilities with intention, and build lives that feel extraordinary to them.

TELL US YOUR STORY.