VOX Teen Blog

Penn Hansa | VOX Staff

Penn Hansa thinks it’s ironic that her name is Penn and she likes to write. This love of writing is effectively proved in her different activities — she is a copy editor for Chattahoochee’s Yearbook staff, a staff member of VOX and a summer intern at Cox Enterprises. This is her blog about work.

Let’s start from the beginning: how I got here. Back in February, Cara (our former program director from VOX) sent out an email to the VOX teen staff about a Shadow Day at Cox Enterprises. I had no idea what Cox was. Never heard of it before. So I looked it up and was astonished to find out that it’s a communications company that owns a host of newspapers, TV shows, radio stations, and websites, as well as a cable/phone service provider (but not in Atlanta; it’s more out in the west/central area of the U.S.). To name a few local places, they’re behind the AJC, WSB-TV/Radio, 95.5 The Beat, B98.5, AutoTrader.com and Manheim. There’s a lot more, trust me. It would take a couple of paragraphs to name them all! Anyways, I signed up, and on a Friday in February, we spent the day at Cox.

My mentor for Shadow Day was Susan Bradbury, Senior Director of Corporate Communications. She was, in short, awesome — showing me around Cox and telling me what the company was all about.

At the end of the day, she said, “You know, Penn, when you’re in college, you should intern here!”

“Well, actually, I’m looking for a summer internship this year, if you have any available.”

“We’ve never had a high school intern before … I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

A couple weeks later, the proposition came up during a meeting, and voila! I became Cox Enterprises’ youngest intern.

Day One

I came to work around 11 a.m. and met up with Jay Croft, my “boss” for my internship. Jay is the editor of InSide Cox, Cox’s magazine for employees and retirees. It publishes on a seasonal schedule and includes the Annual Report, the Chairman’s Letter (which I edited for the Spring 2010 issue back in February!), employee spotlights and stories, and general interest topics.

Jay worked at the AJC before coming to Cox Enterprises and was one of the people who started up the AJC online back when it only had 100,000 views a month. Working with somebody who has such an impressive resume with communications work is amazing and inspiring. It makes me wonder where I could be in the future and what projects I’ll be able to say I worked on.

We went up to the office on the 15th floor (there’s an amazing view of Downtown and Perimeter Mall from the break area) and he introduced me to Mallory Mannheimer, an intern from UGA that I’ll be working with. Mallory is in her last semester of senior year at UGA for Telecommunications, and she’s super helpful and nice and fashionable. I’m jealous.

After being introduced at the monthly staff meeting, Mallory showed me around and told me how everything works here and things we need to do, like restocking the media shelf (basically taking the latest newspapers and replacing the old ones with them), organizing the storage rooms, and cleaning out the invoice drawers.

When Jay came back from the staff meeting, he took us to lunch in the cafeteria downstairs, which has a multitude of food choices. We had lunch with Chris Martin, whose title I cannot remember, but he’s a writer and does a lot of pieces for InSide Cox and writes the Chairman’s Letter as well. He’s super nice (like everybody else here, good gosh).

After lunch, Mallory and I went back up to start organizing the storage room full of freebie items for the Cox Conserves (promoting green living and environmental responsibility) and Cox Cares (volunteering in the community) programs. The room was probably half the size of my bedroom (which I think is fairly large) and full of T-shirts, work aprons, tote bags, picnic bags, coolers, pens, jackets, work gloves, notebooks, bottles of hand sanitizer, and turf tins (grass in a tin!). And it all needed to be organized.

Close to 4 o’clock, it was time to go, and Jay called me to his office. Apparently all the paperwork I’d done was not enough. I still had to get a work permit, which had to be signed by somebody at my school. The school was only open on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it was already closed for the day.  I couldn’t come back to work until I had the work permit signed, sorry.

Stupid paperwork.

Penn, 16, is a rising senior at Chattahoochee High School.