Hokie ClubIzzy Mishler, Virginia Tech volleyball's most efficient attacker and one of the top middles in the ACC during the 2025 season, has epitomized the spirit of being a student-athlete as she was recognized on the All-ACC Academic Team. As she enters her junior year, Mishler has been blessed with multiple enriching academic experiences, from an alumni event hosted by President Tim Sands to a full-time summer lab.
Mishler was raised in a household where both of her parents encouraged her to grow academically. “We always were very focused in school in my house,” she said. “That was our most important thing.” Her mother, Kyle Mishler, prioritized her academics in both high school and later as a student-athlete. Matt Mishler, her father, worked as a math professor, a passion that was also shared with his daughter.
Izzy has stated that both of her parents are her number one supporters.
She found her passion for chemistry in her sophomore year of high school. Mishler realized what she enjoyed — the use of logical thinking and math to describe real-world problems. “That’s when I found out chemical engineering would be the best path for me,” she reflected.
This past spring, Mishler was invited to speak at the Ut Prosim Society Weekend Presidential Spotlight on Students, held on April 25 and hosted by Dr. Tim Sands. She discussed her experiences as a student-athlete and made connections with engineering alumni. She also had the opportunity to share her undergraduate research project, which was a research lab where she worked in polymer sciences, developing plastics, and testing them on a microscopic scale.
Mishler has recently completed a full-time summer lab. “I would describe it as playing engineering,” she noted, “We would get industrial equipment, a set of objectives and we had to come up with a full experimental design as well as a full safety analysis.” She explained how they would get 16 hours to complete the lab, use all the equipment, learn how to work it and run their experiments. Finally, she used their time off to write an experiment report of their findings.
“It was a lot of tedious work and very time-consuming,” she said. “I learned so much and did things that during a normal course you usually don’t get the chance to do.”
She expressed that her favorite part was the problem-solving because it almost never went perfectly. Mishler found interest in those quick adjustments to her experiments and plans.
There was a myriad of topics introduced throughout the lab, with distillation and brewing processes being the ones that caught her attention the most.
“We got to use these big distillation columns,” she explained. “There you have two chemicals with different boiling points, one of them boils first and makes them separate.” Mishler shared her inclination for brewing, indicating that is the field she would hope to make a career out of.
Expecting to graduate in May of 2027, Mishler plans to utilize her last year of eligibility to pursue a graduate degree. Her focus this academic year will be senior design, which is a project-based class that all senior engineering students must complete.
“Sports can give us a lot of amazing opportunities in life,” Mishler said, as she expressed her gratitude about the academic resources, the opportunity to travel and the connections she has made thanks to volleyball.
“I’m trying to take advantage of this student-athlete experience at Virginia Tech as much as I can,” she said as she heads into her final year of undergraduate studies.