Doug Chase ’25

When Doug Chase was evaluating graduate school, he found himself at a crossroads common to many working professionals. He knew he wanted to elevate his career, but he wasn’t sure which academic path would actually move the needle for him.

“I was looking through a couple of different options, comparing programs at Drexel and wondering if I wanted to go for an MBA, an MS or something else entirely,” he recalls. “But when I came across a course called ‘Pitch It!’ and read the description, I knew that was the program I wanted to join, because it felt entirely in line with what I was doing outside of my nine-to-five.”

As the founder of a growing social media marketing agency born out of a pandemic passion project, Chase wasn’t looking to sit through passive corporate theory lectures. He wanted dynamic, live-fire business training. The Close School’s Master of Science in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, with an available concentration in Corporate Entrepreneurship, offered the exact practical application he needed to test his ideas in the real market.

For Chase, the practical value of the degree materialized almost immediately within his corporate role inside higher education. By choosing the corporate entrepreneurship concentration, he gained a specialized intrapreneurship framework designed to drive creative transformation within complex, established organizations.

“The corporate entrepreneurship track is incredibly relatable to what I do, working with complex departments and managing recruitment and digital engagement strategy,” he explains. “Taking what I learned from my peers, the faculty and the coursework, I was able to embed those entrepreneurial frameworks directly into my daily workflows. As a result, we successfully grew our organizational social media engagement by 10 percent in less than a year.”

This focus on real-world application is a core pillar of the Close School’s curriculum. In classes like “Pitch It!,” the one that caught Chase’s eye, and “Ready, Set, Fail!,” students move past static historical case studies to operate inside an educational system built on live market testing, rapid prototyping and strategic experimentation.

Chase credits this immersive environment with instilling an entirely new level of professional confidence. Guided by expert faculty like assistant teaching professor John Wilson, PhD, he learned to view failure not as a definitive end, but as a crucial mechanism for pivoting a business model.

“This is exactly what graduate-level education is supposed to be—a true mentor-mentee relationship where you are collaborating directly with active investors, business owners and industry experts,” he says. “Tapping into John’s personal network, sitting down over coffee outside of regular class hours and brainstorming how to scale my marketing company alongside his ventures are the kinds of opportunity you simply do not get at every university.”

Beyond direct faculty mentorship, the interdisciplinary nature of the MS program allowed Chase to collaborate extensively across campus, working alongside business students from the LeBow College of Business and creative technical minds from the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design. This cross-campus network ultimately enabled him to pay his knowledge forward by returning to campus to speak to undergraduate courses and mentor young creators looking to build their own digital brands.

Today, Doug is leveraging his graduate training to expand the community footprint of his digital media platform, ChaseU. What began as a local coffee and cheesesteak review channel has grown into a powerful vehicle for regional economic development, landing Doug high-profile partnerships with iconic Philadelphia brands like Wawa and Herr’s, as well as several of Philadelphia’s professional sports teams.

Whether he is covering major league events with a press pass or collaborating on product launches with corporate executives, Chase utilizes his entrepreneurial toolkit to manage the business strategy behind the content. Moving forward, he plans to focus on consulting with local restaurant owners and independent brands to teach them how to capitalize on community-driven marketing.

“The Close School teaches you that you have the power to create your own professional opportunities through driven networking and relentless execution,” he says. “Having a Drexel degree means everything to me. It gave me the blueprint to help support local business families, contribute to the regional economy and prove that an entrepreneurial mindset is the ultimate tool for redefining any career path.”