Penn students who came to hear the chair of Penn’s Board of Trustees speak got to hear about his undergraduate yachting experiences with the president and important political figures.
Wednesday evening in Huntsman Hall, Chair of Penn’s Board of Trustees David Cohen shared life anecdotes along with career advice. The event was hosted by the John Marshall Pre-Law Honor Society in order to teach hopeful law school students what it is like to have real legal experience.
President of the Pre-Law Society and College senior Brian Goldman, a Daily Pennsylvanian columnist, said that “David Cohen provides a blend of the political and business” aspects of a law career. Though the event was held for the pre-law honors society, Goldman said that regular Penn students benefited from the event because “it is not often that students get to have this experience of hearing such a famous figure talk.”
Cohen, a 1981 Penn Law School graduate, juggles positions in both the private and public sectors, but he still likes to “take every chance [he] gets to talk to the Penn community.” As the chair of Penn’s Board of Trustees, Cohen reviews the administration’s decisions and judges if they are in accordance with Penn’s goals. In addition, he is also the executive vice president of Comcast Corporation and sits on the boards of Penn Medicine and the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce.
But more than just professional experience, what the audience found most interesting were Cohen’s personal life anecdotes. During his undergraduate experience at Swarthmore College, he was “one of the three Republicans on campus.” Interning during his freshman year at the White House, he worked on Richard Nixon’s yacht and took many moonlight trips with important supporters of the president.
After graduating and helping friend Ed Rendell make an underdog win as Philadelphia mayor then Pennsylvania governor, Cohen went to work for law firm Ballard Spahr. He loved the firm and “thought that he was going to work there forever,” but eventually was lured away by Comcast.
Cohen credits Penn for providing him with “the skills to do well in life,” so he is dedicated to giving back. At Penn, he helped former president Judith Rodin solve the school’s potentially devastating fiscal problems with its medical school. In addition to being the youngest head of Penn’s Board of Trustees, he said he is also the first Trustees chair that holds a Penn degree to not have gotten his undergraduate degree from the University.
Cohen had the following advice for the pre-professional students at Penn: “Take risks in your career and simply go where you will have the best time. Be happy about where you work.”
About 50 students attended the talk, with about half of them being from JMS and half from the greater Penn community. College freshman Chris Chi said that he learned a lot from the presentation and found the anecdotes to be the most intriguing part, as he thought Cohen “a very interesting guy.”
This article was updated from a previous version to clarify that Cohen is not the first chair of the Board of Trustees to not hold a bachelor’s degree from the University, but the first to hold a Penn degree without having a bachelor’s degree from the University. It was also modified to reflect that Cohen worked on Richard Nixon’s yacht, not Ronald Reagan’s.
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