Class of 2025: Sally Steppling named Outstanding Master's Student for Pamplin College of Business

Name: Sally Steppling

College: Pamplin College of Business

Degree: Master's degree in business administration with a concentration in business analytics

Hometown: Loudoun County, Virginia

Plans after graduation: Pursing marketing analytics and brand strategy roles in the greater Washington D.C. metro area

Favorite Hokie memory: The first football game post-pandemic against North Carolina on Sept. 3, 2021. "Since we weren't able to attend any games during my freshman year, this one in the fall of my sophomore year was the first I attended as a student. We won 17-10, and thousands — including myself — rushed to the field to celebrate. After a difficult first year of college, that was such an affirming moment that really grounded me as a VT student and made me fall in love with the university all over again."

Routine, resilience, and a place to thrive

Steppling is the first from her family to attend Virginia Tech. She originally planned to leave Virginia, but a Blacksburg campus visit and chance encounter with a family of Hokies changed her decision. 

“I realized that Virginia Tech isn’t just a school — it’s a legacy that people share with their kids. Deciding to become a Hokie felt bigger than just four years,” Steppling said. 

Arriving in the pandemic‑shadowed fall of 2020, Steppling had the early wisdom to build a strong routine — morning cycling class at McComas Hall, bagel run, then hours spent studying in then-open classrooms — to keep herself on track. By her sophomore year, she declared marketing as her major and added a creative writing minor to balance business and creative pursuits. 

Building career and community in PRISM

Steppling’s college career “didn’t really start until I found PRISM,” Pamplin’s faculty-led, student‑run marketing agency, she said. Admitted after a competitive application process, she spent her junior year managing Pamplin’s flagship social media account while juggling a slate of campagins related to Virginia Tech Giving Day. Today, she manages PRISM’s internal brand strategy and directs onboarding for 25 new “PRISMites” each year — all work that, she said, prepared her to excel in her master's degree program.

PRISM hopefuls complete a client project and deliver a presentation to executives, faculty advisors, and a roomful of alumni. Now, as Steppling completes her capstone project for her master's degree in business administration with a concentration in business analytics and prepares to deliver the final presentation to her client, she remembers that first presentation as the moment she learned to trust her craft and her team. 

“I’m walking into this final presentation knowing that I’ve been in an environment like this, with a lot of pressure and a lot of people relying on me,” said Steppling. “At first it was PRISM, and now it’s this entire cohort of grad students.” 

A serendipitous pivot to analytics

Graduate school wasn’t part of Steppling’s original plan — until two students gave a five‑minute pitch to her senior year marketing class. She recognized one of the students, also a marketing undergraduate, and reached out to learn more. After the conversation, “the light bulb went on,” she said. “I filled out the application that week and never looked back.”

Steppling credits the master's degree in business administration with a concentration in business analytics (MSBA-BA) program with sharpening her technical tool kit — gaining experience coding, creating data visualizations, and developing machine‑learning models — without tempering her love of creative writing. “In the MSBA-BA program, we constantly talk about data storytelling” she said, “which is the skill that’s come most naturally … taking something that’s complex and quantitative and turning it into something that’s clear and compelling.” 

Her capstone project has brought her full-circle to a familiar client: the Pamplin College of Business. Steppling helped shape the college’s public voice on social media as an undergraduate student. Now, her graduate capstone team is mining Pamplin’s enrollment, budget, and engagement data to build an interactive dashboard for senior leadership to aid in the decision-making process.  

"She is truly deserving of this award, and has the hallmarks of a great leader," Rajesh Bagchi, associate dean for Pamplin, said. "She has been working very closely with the senior leadership of Pamplin on this project. Among the students that have worked with me in the past, she is going to leave a lasting legacy."

Recognition five years in the making

For Steppling, Pamplin's Outstanding Master's Student award feels like the culmination of the entire five years of dedication and hard work she’s invested at Virginia Tech. To be selected as one out of the hundreds of Pamplin graduate students is monumental, she said, but “even if it was just my MSBA-BA cohort, to be selected from this pool of people who are the most talented and disciplined people I’ve met at Virginia Tech means the world to me.” 

Steppling’s practical advice to other students is simple: form healthy habits early, sit in the front of the classroom, and recognize that professors may be future colleagues and treat them accordingly. 

“You don’t need to be the smartest, the fastest, or the funniest in the room,” she said, “you need to be the person that people look to because they know that you care.”