Asher Cohen will head to Yale University this fall to attend its prestigious medical school. The newly minted Cal graduate and future physician is excited about this next chapter of his life but acknowledges he’s a bit nervous.
“I’m a math major at Berkeley,” he told J. a few days before graduating, “so I know very little about the human body.”
Odds are he will master the medical reference Gray’s Anatomy in short order. Cohen is just 20 but has already accomplished so much.
He not only got stellar grades throughout his college career. Cohen served as a math tutor to hundreds of fellow students, as student adviser in a philosophy class and as president of the UC Berkeley French Club. (He’s fluent.) He also spent summers interning for a Harvard psychiatry professor, who called Cohen “the best student I have ever worked with in the decade I have been faculty at the Harvard Medical School.”
On top of that, Cohen was the valedictorian for the Class of 2025 as the recipient of the University Medal — UC Berkeley’s highest honor awarded to one graduating senior.
So why the shpilkes?
“Nervousness shows that we care, that we want to succeed, that we know how to be vulnerable, that we’re human,” he told his fellow graduates in his May 17 valedictory speech at the universitywide commencement. “Celebrate the nervousness and the joy of exploring new worlds.”
Cohen embodied that positive attitude throughout his youth in his hometown of Santa Monica. As a student at the K-12 Lycée Français, a French immersion school in Los Angeles, he mastered the French language, even serving as his parents’ translator on a family trip to Paris when he was 9. In his primary school years, he displayed a knack for math and science and skipped a grade.
One aspect of Cohen’s life not reflected in his college resume is the impact of his Jewish upbringing. He and his family are members of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, where he became a bar mitzvah.
“For me, Judaism is a great way to make community,” he said. “It’s been a big way to serve the community and perform mitzvot. At my synagogue in L.A., my mom and I would coordinate the food pantry. I also volunteered at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. It instilled in me prioritizing serving others, something I gravitated toward at Berkeley. If there’s one throughline, it is my commitment to service.”
During his years at Cal, Cohen regularly attended Shabbat services and other events at Berkeley Hillel. He was also deeply affected by the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel and the subsequent anti-Zionist turmoil on campus over the last two school years.
“Moments like those showed me how valuable it was to have found a welcoming community at Berkeley Hillel,” he said. “I knew I would have a place full of fellow Jews I could lean on for support. That was always very reassuring and comforting.”
Cohen found medicine a more attractive career than math or physics because, as he noted, “I realized I wanted a job that centers around human interaction. I shadowed physicians, and I found I loved working in a clinic or hospital. One other reason is the flexibility I saw in medicine. When you have an M.D., there are a lot of different options. I can work in a hospital, for government, for a nonprofit. There are so many open doors available.”
Though Cohen got into other top medical schools, Yale won out because of its global reputation. He’s not sure what specialty he will choose, but hematology, oncology and psychiatry are on the short list. The latter field may win out because of his previous interning at Harvard. In one project he helped compile a database of over 600 mental health apps, then rated them based on objective criteria developed by the American Psychiatric Association. “Not only did this help patients find the right app for them,” he said, ”it also allowed us to analyze the mental health app market as a whole.”
He’s not all business all the time, though. He’s a bit of a foodie, addicted to puzzles and games, and has a passion for Broadway musicals. This summer, he hopes to take a celebratory trip in France before heading to Yale and multiple years of a grueling medical education.
That narrow bridge might make him a bit nervous, but Cohen is not afraid.
“The drive is simply to do things that make me happy,” he said. “That makes them easy and fun to do. I do what I find makes me happy.”