The RAA’s Young Alumni Committee is pleased to spotlight some of the fantastic journeys recent Rutgers graduates are taking as they enter the workforce and make a difference in their community, and their advice to both current and recently graduated students.
Chisa Egbelu SAS’16, is the founder and CEO of PEDUL, a scholarship marketplace for growing diversity in underrepresented fields. He has worked on “Morning Joe,” for Google, and the Eagleton Institute, the Big Ten Network, WRSU, RUTV, and was a contributing writer for Inc. Magazine. The following text has been edited for clarity and space; for the full interview see the video above.
Jordan Cohen: All right. Well, thank you so much everybody for joining us. Our guest today is Chisa Egbelu who is a Rutgers alumnus class of 2016. And in those five years, he has done amazing things. We’re proud to have him as our young alumni spotlight for April. Chisa you came from I believe, Louisiana.
Chisa Egbelu: Yessir.
Right. Ended up coming to Rutgers. Was involved in everything from the Eagleton Institute, WRSU, he was involved in being part of working with the big 10. He was involved with RUTV. And now he is actually the chairman and CEO of his own company, along with another Rutgers alumnus. So Chisa thank you so much for joining us.
Appreciate you, man. And I’ve got to give a shout out also to the Quidditch team that I was president of for two years. They got a special place in my heart. They don’t get enough credit out there. I’ve got to shout them out too.
That sport is a mixture of rugby, basketball,
You’re hip to it
Full on wrestling, I believe. A little bit of track.
Yes. Oh, absolutely. That’s absolutely true.
Well Chisa thank you so much for joining us. You started off in Louisiana.
Yeah. Baton Rouge.
Tell us a little bit about how. Growing up and growing up in Baton Rouge and ended up at Rutgers.
Oh, sure. I mean, I loved growing up in Baton Rouge. I think Louisiana is probably the most unique state in America. One trip to New Orleans will prove that for you. I had a very eclectic experience there. Of course, I played football, was all district defensive MVP for an undefeated team. And I went to LSU lab school, right. It was a little bit of our own beautiful football factory. While I was in Baton Rouge, I got really involved in all types of things, being a logistics coordinator for a college readiness company and working with different students, helping them get to that next level, myself included. Raising our ACT and SAT scores and figuring out how to make things work. And so from there I started working with the mayor’s office on their youth advisory council, really got deeply involved, and that’s where I really started learning about the systemic things that take place that can move someone forward or backwards in their pursuits of educational obtainment. So yeah, I did that, had a great time and was very involved in high school.
We were in a capital and we were also on LSU campus. So there were a lot of interesting things that came too. But part of my experience there, I did feel as if it was very…not exactly diverse. Right? I felt like I was either on the white side of town or the black side of town unfortunately. And you know, that really drove what I was looking for in a college. I wanted to go to college where I felt everything is there and everyone is there and there’s opportunity for collaboration. And so you know, when I was visiting Rutgers, Rutgers is an incredible campus. I got there and I was walking around; I’m seeing everyone, and it felt like the work you put in can equal the work you put out, right? You put in hard work and you can see results. And honestly, that’s a unique feeling. It’s not a feeling that is universal by any means. So I fell in love with Rutgers from that perspective. And I love that it actually had a real campus. I wasn’t like NYU where you’re ashamed to wear anything that reps your school you know. There was a real campus, a real community. And not only that, Rutgers was able to have communities within communities. I loved the multitude of campuses that give you different auras, different energy, different vibes depending on what you’re looking for. And so for me, I actually first learned about Rutgers when I was in…Middle school. I think the woman’s basketball team was just on sports center. And I remember I was with my friend’s dad and I was like, ‘where’s Rutgers’ and he’s like ‘New Jersey’. And I was like, ‘wow, that seems so far away.’
And here you are.
Exactly, crazy how the world works.
And so that’s how you ended up seeing Rutgers and deciding to take the visit.
I mean, that was middle school. So, it just stayed in my head. And I was just looking at schools in the northeast and I saw Rutgers. My final account came down to NYU, Boston, U and Rutgers. And I fell in love with the Rutgers experience over all of them.
You came over to Rutgers. You’re a kid from Louisiana. You’re not playing football; you get here. Tell us about those first couple of weeks at school.
I actually got to school about a week and a half late because I was in a hurricane to start off September.
I felt I was playing catch up when I got there. Luckily for me, I did do a one week program, summer program at Rutgers before called leadership quest. It was in the back corner of Cook-Douglass and it really introduced me to the Rutgers experience and meeting students from all over the country that were also coming in.
So for me, when I finally got to school after being a week and a half late and missing a lot of the first fun stuff I got there and my floor, you know, they had already all met each other and I was trying to play catch up. But I caught up really quick and got acclimated and I felt I had a bit of a spoiled experience. And in a good way. Right? I felt I was spoiled because I was in the towers and there were just amazing people from all over the world because the towers are an international dorm.
We had our friends that were coming from Ridgefield, New Jersey and we had our friends that were coming from Russia and we had our friends aren’t coming from Virginia. And we had our friends that were coming from Vernon, Vernon, New Jersey. Right. So we just had such an amazing experience of all learning so much from each other.
Just, you know, even within New Jersey and it’s very easy to get siloed into your town or your, your region, your community, and you get the Rutgers. And it’s as if, the entire world pours into this five mile radius. You know what I mean? In that dorm, we all compiled into this.
Like one floor and we just became such a family. And those are still the people I talk to heavily today. I had an amazing experience, plus my roommate and I had the same birthday. I don’t know if that was on purpose, but it was a great way for us to come together.
That’s awesome. What were some of those most meaningful experiences? Beyond, you know, it sounds like your freshmen semester was incredible, which tower by the way,
Oh South tower, bro. Soto,
North tower is better.
No, sir.
We get better access to the buses.
But you don’t get the exercise running to the buses.
Alright, so it sounds like you had an amazing beginning. You did some really amazing things while you were at the school. Tell us a little bit about some of those meaningful experiences you had while you were a student.
Yeah. You know, so much of going to school and going to college at a place where people have all different views is that you just get exposed to so much. And that’s what helped me out. Right. I, it wasn’t until I was in my floor, just talking to people on other floors and meeting, I realized that, ‘Oh, there’s a radio station here.’
Okay, cool. Let me go to an intro meeting or even just, you know, it was my floor. We were the ones that first went to that first Quidditch practice. All right. And we’re thinking, ‘let’s just see what’s going on.’ And the ability to have a collective unit of individuals that are just willing to try new things that they’ve never done.
You know, one person says, ‘oh yeah, my grandma used to talk about this things’. Let’s go see what it’s about, you know? And so I was heavily involved in, in my floor dynamics, but also those are the people that I went and started playing quidditch with those are the people that you know, we went into our first meditation and yoga class together.
You know, I love to, you know, going out to College Ave together with them on those late nights and figuring out the world and it was an incredible experience for us where we developed our characters. I think that was also the first semester that the movie theater was open as well on Livi.
This is all just freshman year.
Yeah. That’s all just freshman year.
And then you ended up working with Eagleton.
Yeah.
WRSU, RUTV. I believe you ended up working for Morning Joe. Yeah. How, how did you start getting involved in there?
I went and asked them, how can I get involved? First you know when it came to RUTV you know what it was, I forgot the summer before I worked for RUTV. I wanted to be an orientation leader and then I thought I was going to have to, I thought I had to take classes over the summer. So I said, ‘I guess I can’t be an orientation leader.’
And then something fell through and I wasn’t going to take classes and It was too late for me to sign up for being an orientation leader. And so that summer, my friends became custodians and janitors for Rutgers on Bush campus for the entire summer.
And during that process, we lived on our off-campus house. We were doing. Everything from dorm room repair to janitor work, we were cleaning up entire dorms rearranging the furniture for incoming students. It was such a hard job. It was so hard. It’s a job that makes you be like, yeah, I’m definitely going to get my education.
Like I’m done. We did that. And at nighttime, we would hang out with the orientation leaders and stuff, the only other people that were really on campus. Right. And during that process, there was a girl that was orientation leader named Lauren, who was one of the managers at RUTV.
And, as we’re hanging out, she said, come right here. This is what are we doing? RUTVX, Y, Z. And she says, ‘Oh yeah, we actually have an opening. If you’re, if you’re available.’ And I was like, please, give me anything else to do. That’s how I like made my transition from like custodian on Bush campus to work over at RUTV on Bush campus.
That’s what sparked you into all these different media?
Yeah, I was already working in WRSU before that, you know, before that experience I didn’t know how to get to RUTV. I didn’t, I don’t know if I even knew it was there to be honest with you. But like the Rutgers way, you meet all these different people and you start talking to them and you learn about new things.
So I was working at the. The custodial spot during the daytime. And then like at afternoon, like when my shift would end, I’d go over to RUTV and work within programming. And then I was also working my radio show as well at the same time and WRSU. And what was your radio show? Rutgers Recess, number one show on station. Essentially it was, it was kind of an Elvis Duran in The Morning show, which is what ended up, you know, taking us in afterwards. We started off, it was kinda like a, maybe a 101.5 breakfast club, or we bring in these artists from all over the tri-state. We talk about pop culture. We talk about systemic issues and the educational system and ways to improve. We would bring up professors to talk. It was just funny, creative programming. We would do a little pranks on people that had been recorded and then play it on air. That’s the place where I was happiest on campus. And I was happy in a lot of places, but being in that studio, definitely, it was my happy place.
I want to circle back to this in a minute, but let’s talk for a minute about what you’re doing now. You started your own company in 2016, right?
Yep.
Tell us a little bit about it. Tell us about that process. Tell about what it is.
Sure. What Pedul is today, it’s a platform that helps corporations diversify their workforce with scholarships. And so that means that when we work with Viacom, CBS, or paramount pictures or Wiley or Oracle you know, they obviously can’t put up a job description for a woman developer, right. Or a Latino data scientist. But what we allow them to do is put up a scholarship for that exact same thing. And then we take that scholarship and use it as a vehicle. To source and recruit students from across the country that match their specific criteria. And so Wiley, they call us America’s number one, diversity act. We really ran with that. And Wiley’s the oldest publishing company in the country. They started 1807 almost as old as Rutgers.
We’ll let them try. They are older than the RAA, so we’ll give them that.
That’s fair. That’s fair. So, yeah, so we that’s the company we have now. We’re based out of Newark. Actually we went over right over from New Brunswick and we’re actually based out of the Rutgers business school on the seventh floor there. Yeah, that was the company that we started as students. And we, you know, what we were doing is we would just meet at the Livi student center every Sunday morning at 10:00 AM. And we would stay and work on things until 6:00 PM, just learning how to code working on business plans, et cetera. And it just came out of a need. You know, we saw that school was getting more and more expensive and we’re thinking, “how can we. Get these large corporations to invest in the students that are, that need it the most?”
It sounds like you were on a track for a lot of multimedia between the radio TV Morning Joe, you on a track for all these different things. And then you kind of switched focus real quick and really laser-focused on to this. Was that a conscious decision or…
I think it was just about going about the opportunities that are presented to you at Rutgers. You know? I wouldn’t even say I switched focus as much. I just use my skillset. For other means, right? Because the journalism, it all helped me so much just to be able to ask the right questions and, you know, being at Eagleton when you’re dealing with polling and you’re dealing with questions for, for a living I, I learned very quickly how to find the right answers to be able to do whatever you want to do.
So we asked a lot of questions when building a company and we built what we wanted to, but before that, Pedal. I was involved with another company called Chakara foods at Rutgers. Just a bunch of us got together and built a company for this competition called the Hult prize that we ended up winning at Rutgers and then we were regional finalists in Boston. That was just a company that a group of my friends and I made together. And that was like my first foray into starting a company and utilizing my journalism skillset to expand it. It just transitioned organically. And you know, with the company, you have to do a lot of talking like this but you have to write it and produce a lot of videos, scripts and everything in between. I met my co-founder in journalism class. It still really helped me out. I think that we have a huge opportunity. This morning, I just got off of a call. It was a pilot call and, you know they’re writing a pilot based on our company right now for a TV show. So I had to use a lot of what I learned at school and within productions that you’d be able to have like the proper input to build that.
That’s awesome. What are some lessons you learned at Rutgers that you use in that day to day?
That everyone knows something that you don’t. You learn how to respect different opinions at Rutgers because you will just be shocked over and over again about someone who Is experiencing something that you’ve never even thought of.
And you learn about them and their background and you learn to make it make sense. And you learn that having different opinions can create a product, a process, or a result that is just going to benefit more people. I think that I also learned that you can, you know, jump off the ledge. And I mean that in the best of ways, right? Take chances. It’s okay to not know, Rutgers will teach you that. It’s okay to not know. And for me it took the fear out of the process. Right? You don’t have to be scared because there’s a lot more in that. The other side of fear.
I love it. Absolutely love it. And is that the kind of advice you would give to new graduates and to some current students, is that the advice you would give or is there something more?
You know, I would say don’t let your fear hold you back. Most of your hesitation is fear-based. You know, you’re at a place where you can try new things and try not to let the fear, the hesitation holds you back and. Really analyze a situation so you can get those new opportunities to shift how you think about certain topics; to shift how you want to attack.
Do it yourself and making it work. And then you always have your Rutgers community to lean on to, to find out new things. That’s always been helpful, right? Getting to talk to someone. This morning I was talking to this venture capitalist that is based in San Francisco, randomly is from Andover, New Jersey, and went to Rutgers class of ’02. So it’s beautiful that you get to lean into this community and lean into this network in all types of fields to learn from them. I’ve never reached out to someone from RU and they slapped the opportunity out of my hand. They’re always saying, “all right, let’s talk.”
What do you have planned for the future?
I think we’re going to scale this company up. We’re really looking to target that hundred million dollar revenue point and really bounce from there. And then from there, I think there’s a lot that we still want to do, even in regards to maybe stepping into investing. I know I want to do a lot more within media and that scope and stepping more into my creative process in general. I loved this morning going through that pilot and figuring out how the directors are going to take it. And I think I would do more of that.
What’s your biggest point of pride as a Scarlet night?
I think it’s for me, probably Cap & Skull. That’s something I was really proud of getting inducted into. It doesn’t mean that anyone that didn’t get inducted into it, that it is a detriment to any sort of your character or anything like that. But, you know, I know that some of my best friends came out of that community. And even how I met you, Jordan was through someone that was in Cap & Skull.
Anthony Covington
Yeah. So he’s, you know, one of my predecessors in Cap & Skull that I also met in a class that our professor was another member of Cap & Skull from like the eighties. So, you know, I, I was really honored to get tapped into that society and, you know, follow in the footsteps of Paul Robeson and other awesome individuals.
Chisa, thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you so much for this, we’re so glad to have you as our young alumni spotlight and we hope you’ll stay involved in the RAA, Great things are ahead.
Thank you!
Young Alumni Spotlight The RAA’s Young Alumni Committee is pleased to spotlight some of the fantastic journeys recent Rutgers graduates are taking as they enter
Young Alumni Spotlight The RAA Young Alumni Committee would like to spotlight some of the fantastic journeys Rutgers graduates are taking as they enter the
Young Alumni Spotlight The RAA Young Alumni Committee would like to spotlight some of the fantastic journeys Rutgers graduates are taking as they enter the
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