 In the fall of 1976, while Penn was a first-year law student at Columbia University, he and his business partner Douglas Schoen became the pollsters for congressman Ed Koch's second (and first successful) run for mayor of New York City.In 1977, with the campaign against Mario Cuomo for the Democratic nomination in full swing, Penn sought a way to conduct polls more quickly than the mainframe and punched card system he and Schoen were making use of at Columbia University.He purchased a self-assembled "microcomputer" kit and created a program that could compile polls in a fraction of the time than had been done before.