Finance
Contact Information
Biography
I'm Luke Lazzara, a finance major in the Haslam Integrated Business and Engineering (IBEP) 2029 cohort. I'm originally from Austin, Texas; it took me a while to accept that the real UT was in Tennessee, but I got there eventually.
I learned the value of work ethic early, through soccer. I was undersized and technically behind most of the players I faced, so I made sure I outworked them instead. There were teams that were physically and technically superior to us, but they never wanted it more than us. That same drive showed up again in my most recent internship, where I learned just as much about persistence and resilience as I did about building real customer relationships.
It's also the instinct that led me to IBEP. A friend first introduced me to the program as a way to bridge business and engineering, and the idea stuck with me long before I got to UT. I saw exactly why it mattered during a high school incubator class, where business students were supposed to build a tangible product for investors, except we had no engineers and no way to reach manufacturers on our timeline. We ended up building the product ourselves. That experience is what convinced me that the gap between business people and engineers is real, and worth closing.
At UT, I've followed a fairly traditional finance track. Taking finance classes, plus a summer internship in futures, a field my dad has worked in for over 20 years. It would be the obvious path. But movies have shaped my life just as much as finance has. I analyze situations the way I analyze a scene in a movie: I look for the detail that changes everything. That's the lens I want to bring to the film industry, not as a director or writer, but on the finance side of production. Executive producer, production finance manager, line producer, any role where I can sit at the intersection of the story and the numbers behind it.
