The History of Lanterna
The Birth of Lanterna
The idea of Lanterna was originally developed from a CAS*-project in 2002. As older students we were helping younger students with their academic performance – everything from helping out with homework to teaching complete concepts that students had missed or not understood. For these students, our help turned out to be an invaluable complement to the ordinary teaching.
*CAS is a required part of the IB diploma programme curriculum and stands for creativity, action and service. It encourages students to be active outside their academic studies.
From Idea to a Company
In 2003 we took the idea that successful graduated students could tutor and help younger students and made it into organized courses. We gathered students that had graduated from the IB and gone on to university within different subjects during the Easter break of 2004. We invited students from schools around Stockholm, Sweden, to take part in our newly formed revision classes in the facilities of the Royal Institute of Technology that we had rented. And guess what - it turned out to be a great success!
Developing the Professional Organization
Marketing professionals sometimes say that the best marketing is word of mouth. This is exactly how the knowledge about our courses was spread. Satisfied students telling their friends about our courses was the way our courses expanded. And over the years the number of students increased dramatically. In the early years this proved to be one of our main challenges: to accommodate the increasing number of students that came from all across Europe and beyond without compromising one bit of our quality. This demanded a professional organization, which was the main focus to develop during these years.
Moving to London
As the demand for our courses increased, students started to ask us if we could open up a course center in UK. After investigating different cities and colleges we decided that Regent’s College and London would be optimal for our courses. During the fall of 2007 we felt that we were ready to start our second course center. The mission was still the same: To provide courses of high quality at a reasonable price. In the spring of 2008 we opened the door to our spring revision in London. Looking back at the courses we can be very proud - a wonderful group of tutors and highly satisfied customers.
Summer Courses and Winter Courses
"Why can’t you run summer courses?" - A question that we received so many times that was impossible to count. Once again we listened to our customers and spent the entire fall of 2007 to find the best possible locations for our summer courses in the UK and in Sweden. Also, a lot of time went into creating the 'summer course concept', since we had to make our summer courses differ completely from our Spring Exam Preparation Courses. We launched our summer courses in the summer of 2008 and since then, the summer courses have become as natural a part of our course offering as are our spring courses. Similarly, students have often requested courses to prepare them for their mock exams, since many apply to college with those grades. Accommodating these needs, and those of students just wanting an extra revision to prepare themselves for the final exams, we started the winter courses in 2009.
The Future
Our services are becoming increasingly popular due to the high satisfaction our course attendees experience. We are expanding, and we hope to be able to help more and more IB students on their way to great exam results.
