Great benefits, terrible balance.
Pros
Epic has some great opportunities especially for young graduates right out of college. The pay is well above average for a first job, and they throw you right in; after a month or two of training, you get a ton of responsibility. It's quite overwhelming at first, but they push you to believe you can do more than you think you can. It takes a while to understand what you're doing, but once you do, the work can be quite rewarding. There's a lot of flexibility when you're in the office. If you somehow have enough time to finish your work and have a few hours left, you can go ahead and go to that doctor's appointment or head home early to prepare for vacation. You're not bound by the clock except for whatever meetings you have and whatever work is on your plate.
Cons
Your success here depends primarily on the luck of the draw. If you get a bad team lead, get stuck on a bad customer, or you don't get the support that you need from your customer team, your career here will be short. You'll watch your chances for advancement shrivel away as you get left behind by other that get adequate help and support, and work with a customer that doesn't drive them into the ground. You need to learn to say "no" to Epic. For recent graduates, this is very hard because you want to seem capable and take on as much as they can throw at you, because Epic will know when enough is enough, right? Wrong. They will keep piling it on; you either learn to say no or crack under the pressure. This is the hardest part about this job and the reason so many people quit so early. They are given too much to do, so they are overworked, overstressed, and spend their nights and weekends agonizing over deadlines because they don't have any other options. Epic can very easily be considered a "churn and burn" company for those in the project manager role. If you like traveling, you'll get to do it. A lot. But keep in mind that if you want to have any semblance of a work-life balance, you can forget it. The travel expectations are far too high and you'll throw out any prospects of a personal life at home because you'll spend at least 50% of your time living out of a suitcase. Your best friends will be made with your co-workers on your project team, because they're the only people you'll get to see on a regular basis. Benefits are slowly starting to be taken away, non-compete agreements are getting longer, and arbitration is becoming mandatory due to a recent high-profile lawsuit. If you don't know any better, there's still a lot here for you. But you have to be careful. Current non-compete prevents you from working for any customer, competitor, or consulting company of Epic for TWO YEARS. Since the skills you learn are best leveraged in those positions, if you decide that Epic isn't right but the field is, you're stuck changing industries for quite a while before you can jump back in. Watch out; Epic is the kind of company that will encourage you to leave of your own accord. This is so they can challenge unemployment claims and claim that turnover is low. If you don't know much about the landscape of healthcare right now, be careful. The carrot of ARRA has now become the stick, and the regulations imposed by the ACA are turning the field into more of an environment of "do this because you'll get penalized", instead of "do this for the good of the patient". The companies that cared about the latter are already using Epic. The ones that waited are now scrambling, so your chances of working on a customer with level-headed management and quality counterparts is dwindling quickly.
