For student athletes, “free time” can seem like a foreign concept. Between practice schedules, traveling to games and keeping up with coursework any other commitments can be challenging to fit in. But for three student athletes in Marquette Business, summer internships at Milwaukee-based fintech company Fiserv led to hands-on work experience—and job offers after graduation.
Sayla Lotysz, who plays lacrosse for the Golden Eagles, said Fiserv was one of her “goal internships” when she started researching opportunities her sophomore year. “I’ve always been really interested in tech, and I knew that Fiserv was a leading fintech company,” says Lotysz, a senior who is majoring in finance, marketing and Accelerating Ingenuity in Markets (AIM).
In summer 2024, Lotysz worked as a finance intern at Fiserv. She was invited back to intern again the summer after her junior year in 2025.
Her first summer at Fiserv, Lotysz “did a lot of deep digging into billing audits,” she says. And it wasn’t just busy work: “I was able to find $330,000 in incremental revenue that was not being billed, so I brought that to my manager.”
Lotysz says the AIM major prepared her to hit the ground running at Fiserv by giving her the knowledge to create pricing curves and perform statistical analyses. She is also a peer tutor in the athletic department, helping other student athletes—including some of her own teammates—with subjects including business statistics, finance and economics.
“Tutoring for the athletic department [in business statistics] is an experience that made me very ready to do these logarithmic regressions,” Lotysz says.
Josie Bieda, a Golden Eagles soccer player and a senior majoring in finance, information systems and AIM, also drew upon skills she learned in business courses during her summer 2025 internship at Fiserv.
“I came in with strong SQL knowledge, which allowed me to jump right in and contribute,” says Bieda. Her coursework also introduced her to programming languages like Python, “which made working with Python on the job much easier,” she says.
For student athletes like Bieda, juggling the demands of their sport alongside an internship can be tricky, even when school is out for the summer.
“Working 40 hours in the office each week while training for preseason was tough,” Bieda says. “Most days, it meant starting my workouts at 6 a.m. and training both before and after work to complete my daily regimen.”
For senior Teddy Wong, a finance and AIM major who also plays on Marquette’s men’s tennis team, the mental fortitude he developed as an athlete is an asset that came in handy while interning with Fiserv’s corporate accounting team in summer 2025.
From tennis, Wong says he developed “mental toughness” that can be useful in an office— “just staying mentally strong and focused throughout the day,” he says.
For Lotysz, a lifetime of teamwork also helped prepare her for the challenges of her two summer internships at Fiserv.
“I’ve been on a team setting all my life as an athlete, so being able to communicate strengths and weaknesses, take orders, take criticism and take feedback; I’ve learned all of that through lacrosse,” she says. “All of that has translated, plus learning how to work with a lot of different personalities.”
Lotysz, Bieda and Wong all accepted full-time roles in Fiserv’s rotational analyst program beginning after they graduate in spring 2026. The two-year rotational program exposes recent graduates to different sides of the business as they start their careers.
To other student athletes interested in gaining internship experience, Bieda says it’s doable, especially with a little planning.
“Start the search early and be open to different opportunities,” she says. “I’ve had two internships, and both were flexible with my soccer schedule because I communicated my commitments clearly. Time management is critical.”
