Marina Prediger, who earned her BSBA and MBA at UMSL and also played on the women’s tennis team, recently started a new position as an internal auditor at Lenovo in São Paulo, Brazil. (Photo courtesy of Marina Prediger)
Marina Prediger does not get bored in her role as an internal auditor at Lenovo, a multinational computer manufacturer and cloud service provider. Since joining the team in the Fortune 500 company’s São Paulo, Brazil, sales offices in April, she’s found there’s always something new to learn and different areas of the company to explore.
In her new role, she performs audits focused on the internal operations of the company, providing independent insights related to risks and improvement potentials. Typically, her day-to-day involves meeting with different company stakeholders, understanding internal processes, traveling to the facilities, and working with global teams and colleagues across Lenovo. She said Lenovo has been a great place to kickstart her career since graduating from the University of Missouri–St. Louis with her MBA in 2022.
Prediger, who grew up in Porto Alegre, Brazil, came to UMSL as a student-athlete on the women’s tennis team. She played tennis from a young age, competed in junior tournaments and, when she was in high school, decided she wanted to use tennis as a way to help her study abroad. She began applying to different universities and, not long after, was recruited by Rick Gyllenborg, at the time the men’s and women’s tennis coach at UMSL.
Initially, Prediger wasn’t sure what she wanted to study in college, but she leaned in the business direction – her father is an entrepreneur, so she liked the idea of staying in the family business. As she learned more about the offerings in UMSL’s College of Business Administration, her decision became an easy one.
“The whole experience was so nice and very different than the experience in Brazil,” Prediger said. “In the universities in Brazil, sports are not like U.S. universities. I wouldn’t have been able to continue to play competitive tennis and also get a degree from a great university such as UMSL if I stayed here. That opened a lot of doors, for sure.”
While pursuing her BSBA at UMSL, Prediger found support both in her professors as well as in her coaches and fellow players on the women’s tennis team and UMSL Athletics more broadly. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit during the final semester of her undergraduate career, that support proved crucial. Prediger was playing a tournament with the tennis team in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, when they found out about classes being moved online due to stay-at-home orders. Soon after, she returned home to Brazil, where she completed her BSBA online and also decided to take the opportunity to start her first semester of the MBA program.
In January 2021, Prediger was excited to be able to come back to the UMSL campus to finish out her graduate degree in person. She embraced an active role on campus both as a graduate assistant in the Graduate Business office and on the tennis team, as she was able to play one more year and then become the team’s assistant coach. She said her experience as a student-athlete helped set her up for success in her career in the business world.
“It definitely helped me develop strengths that are great for my career such as teamwork, time management, and leadership,” she said. “It has also helped me build connections and a strong work ethic. My teammates and coaches always gave me the support needed to succeed in the tennis court and in the classroom. They are a big part of my journey and success.”
After earning her MBA in 2022, Prediger started working as an audit associate at Bayer. She first developed an interest in auditing through some friends who had gone into the field and, after doing some research of her own, decided it would be a great area in which to start her career. “It is nice that we get to work with many different areas of the company, and you definitely learn a lot about the company’s operations overall,” she said.
In her new role in the internal audit department at Lenovo, Prediger is excited to get more experience in the field, and she sees plenty of opportunities for future growth within the company. A few years down the line, she could see herself moving up to a project manager position, leading audits and working directly with the company’s key stakeholders. Looking back, she feels her experience at UMSL – both as an athlete and as a BSBA and MBA student – supported her career development when it came time to join the corporate world.
“A lot of the classes – especially working in teams on group projects – definitely helped prepare me for this,” she said. “The professors in the department have been super supportive in my development as a student and also later on in my career, and I’m also very appreciative of the tennis coach and my tennis team who worked with me throughout this journey. I’m super grateful for all the opportunities I had at UMSL.”
