In real estate, Chelsea Rodriguez-Mejia found room for all her interests
After nearly choosing culinary school, VCU Business junior Chelsea Rodriguez-Mejia landed in a field that let her do more.
By Megan Nash
Chelsea Rodriguez-Mejia (B.S. ’27) still finds comfort walking the aisles of Lowe’s and Home Depot when she misses home. It’s the smell of wood, she says, that brings her back.
Growing up in Stafford, Virginia, weekends often meant tagging along with her dad, a homebuilder, to visit job sites. She would wander through half-finished homes with floor plans taped to the walls, imagining what it would feel like to live there.
“I would go through the house and say, ‘OK, this is going to be my room. Oh wait—I want the closet from the other house. And I need a big kitchen,’” Rodriguez-Mejia said. “I would just get so fascinated.”
Back then, she thought of becoming an architect—or maybe an interior designer. But by high school, her interests shifted. She joined her school’s culinary track and stuck with it for three years, earning an industry certification. For a while, the plan was to open a restaurant. She even considered a culinary program in Kentucky.
Then she started having the same dream, night after night. For three weeks straight, she was walking through a hotel she had designed. At the bottom of the building was her restaurant.
“It just kept coming back,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. I felt stuck.”
That pull didn’t go away. She turned down the culinary program and enrolled instead at the VCU School of Business, where the VCU Kornblau Real Estate Program felt like a place she could bring all her interests together.
Since arriving at VCU, Rodriguez-Mejia has leaned into real estate from every angle. She joined both the Real Estate Club at VCU and the student chapter of the Home Builders Association of Richmond (HBAR) during her sophomore year. At HBAR, she served on the executive board managing social media—her way of getting a foot in the door.
“There was an opening on the executive board, so I thought I would do outreach or social media,” she said. “I was just trying to get involved.”
Around the same time, while visiting family in El Salvador, she applied to be co-president of the Real Estate Club—sending screenshots of her application through spotty Wi-Fi. By the next semester, she had stepped into leadership roles in both organizations, taking over as HBAR president after the previous board graduated.
Earlier this year, she and four other students traveled to Las Vegas for the National Association of Home Builders International Builders’ Show®—a trip supported by the Bob and Anna Lou Schaberg Foundation.
“Over 80,000 people attended,” she said. “It was a super incredible learning experience, especially for networking. There were so many products and companies I didn’t even know existed. It broadened my knowledge, and I thought that was pretty exciting.”
Now a Kornblau Real Estate Fellow—a program that places students in two back-to-back internships with local firms—she’s splitting her summer between Divaris Real Estate and The Wilton Companies. She says the chance to apply what she’s learning in real time has shifted how she sees the field.
“It’s all kind of connecting,” she said. “I feel like I’m learning so much every day—and it kind of just pushes me more.”
That mindset showed up again at a luncheon hosted by Kornblau Circle of Excellence member John Reed, senior managing director at Berkadia, where she heard from Smart Grow Agritech CEO and COO Alex Mann and learned about blockchain in real estate.
“It [blockchain] was new to me, so I was intrigued,” she said. “It gave me a different perspective.”
Rodriguez-Mejia admits she’s still figuring it all out. But she doesn’t see that as a limitation.
“My goals keep changing because I keep learning more,” she said. “The dream’s still there,” she continued. “The picture just keeps getting bigger.”
She’s especially drawn to commercial real estate and development—an area where she hopes to fully immerse herself, whether that means learning from every opportunity, building her network or contributing to projects that make a difference.
“It energizes me,” she said. “I’m ready to give it everything I’ve got.”
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