Penn Students Attend the Nominating Conventions in Extraordinary Political Times
Eight days after completing a summer internship at CNBC’s breaking news desk, then-fourth-year Penn student Isabel Engel flew to Chicago to attend the 2024 Democratic National Convention. There she met Rep. Nancy Pelosi during a taping of the “Politics War Room” podcast, had a conversation with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and told Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro how his 2022 campaign inspired her to get involved with voting in Philadelphia.
“I grew up right outside D.C. and both my parents have worked on Capitol Hill in various capacities, so I’ve experienced politics for much of my life,” said Engel, who graduated with degrees in Communication and Political Science this May, “but the energy at the [DNC] was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.”
Institute for Public Service Director David Eisenhower and lecturer Marjorie Margolies, a former broadcast journalist and Democratic congresswoman, have been taking Penn undergraduate students to the Democratic and Republican conventions every presidential cycle since 2000 — except for 2020, due to the COVID pandemic — as part of their Conventions, Debates, and Campaigns course. This past election cycle, Craig Snyder, former chief of staff to Republican U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter and president of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, joined the teaching team.
“We are the only university that does this; the only one anywhere,” said Eisenhower. He says he loves seeing students come alive while having an experience he had at their age. In 1968, at age 20, he attended the Republican nominating convention for Richard Nixon, his soon-to-be father-in-law. Eisenhower had first met the nominee’s daughter, Julie Nixon, at the 1956 convention, which had re-nominated his grandfather, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Thirteen Penn students taking the class attended the DNC, and six went to the RNC in Milwaukee, including then-fourth-year Communication majors Isabel Sweeney and Elizabeth Collins.
“It was a very interesting experience through and through. It was also interesting timing: it happened two days after Trump got shot, and there was a lot of heightened security, said Sweeney. Collins chimed in, “Heightened everything. Heightened rhetoric, heightened passion.”
Collins said that most mornings, the students attended panels organized by Eisenhower in collaboration with the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. These sessions featured journalists, political scientists and other experts, and marked the first time the two Annenberg schools partnered for the conventions.
After mentioning that she got a picture with NBC journalists Savannah Guthrie and Kristen Welker, Collins commented that being exposed to the journalism industry “and seeing that live, with the expertise of our professors and our students, was just so formative and made me really proud of all the work I’ve done at Penn.”
Having grown up and gone to school in “a bit of a bubble,” Sweeney said the reaction to Trump’s first appearance at the convention one of the event’s most memorable moments for her.
Afterwards, students wrote about and presented on various topics related to their experience, contextualizing it with data and other research. Lex Gilbert, a then-fourth-year majoring in Communication and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, who co-founded Penn’s Disabled Coalition, spoke about disability and accessibility. They explained that the 2024 DNC included the first ramp to the floor in convention history as well as sign language interpreters, and that halfway through the event, closed captions moved from side screens to the main screen.
“I think my favorite thing about Annenberg,” Engel said, “is the hands-on experience and the experiential learning that you gain, whether it’s from a professor like Al Hunt who literally teaches from journalistic experience, or Eisenhower and Craig and Marjorie…I think going to the convention was an incredible way to continue that hands-on experience and see, oh my gosh, this is what a degree in communication can really do for me.”
