Great mission, execution needs work
Pros
The Institute is unique in its approach: instead of having many disparate labs allow doing things differently, it has them all unified in purpose and process. Big science gets done here par excellence The hours are great for science and no one is expected to put in more than 40 hours a week. Generous vacation hours and an excellent match on 401k contributions up to the federal limit! Great location and even better building. If you're not driving, it's no sweat getting here; you can even kayak into work. Always growing - I started when it was just around 350 employees and in two years we've hit 450 with still more to go. Cell Science is growing too. You get to meet World-class scientists every day and there's not a neuroscientist that hasn't heard of the Institute. Having a luminary in the field stop by for a lecture is old hat.
Cons
Low pay for RAs in the area and no visible efforts to ameliorate that other than the oft-commented, "we're looking into it". Turn-over can be high because of the the reasons of pay and also that we attract such high-quality candidates that many are off to med/grad school in 2 years or less. Not much room to progress as an RA. Sure you can keep on collecting a yearly 3% pay increase and the occasional promotion but any increase in scientific duties is severely hampered by the lack of a PhD. This explains internal rollover as employees change teams to keep searching for the "green grass". The Institute is trying to track RA3's towards management or science but we have yet to see what this means. Management can be poor because the Institute, like many other research orgs, it hires managers as scientists first and managers second. It feels like the good managers were purely incidental rather than deliberate (because so many of those with the title Scientist turn out to be better managers than the Managers anyways). I feel like the work that I do goes unnoticed and unrecognized by my manager who is more concerned with doing their own science and reporting numbers than being around enough to listen to what I have to say. Many RAs get burnt out by bad management and end up leaving science for good; I'm trying my hardest not to be one of them but I can't say I'm winning that fight.
