Pros
There are lots of “little” wonderful things about New America place to work day-to-day, above all: brilliant, generous, fun colleagues. But also other things that affect your wellbeing: an unbelievably generous vacation policy (after your first year, you’ll accrue 8 weeks off) or, Summer Fridays (office closes at 2pm on Fridays during the summer to let people start the weekend early) or the free snacks and abundant leftover food from events. Bigger picture, New America responds really well to individual motivation and energy. This means that there are opportunities everywhere (especially for younger staff) that would be difficult to find elsewhere. I was surprised that another review said there were few opportunities for junior staff, as that has absolutely not been my experience, or that of many of my colleagues. (It’s not many places where junior staff can have the opportunity to author policy papers—completely on their own or co-authored with more senior staff.) If you want to get really really good at one particular thing, or have a defined career path that requires a defined/concrete skill set, there may be other places that could be a better fit. But, within the think tank-y space, working at New America, can give you valuable experience and exposure to lots of different things—developing research and writing skills, building subject matter expertise, designing/running events, understanding the grant application process, etc. This is really valuable, especially if you’re early career. You'll also get to publish writing under your own name, which is really important if you are early career—some places sort of feed credit upwards, which I don’t think I realized. Also, there are ton of outstanding, experienced people around who can be very generous with their time and mentorship, who have different backgrounds and are going in different directions. If you are still figuring out possibilities for your career, it’s really energizing and useful to have access to such professional diversity, including the amazing New America fellows, who work on everything under the sun.
Cons
While some opportunities are obvious to see, some require a lot of self-motivation/direction to fully take advantage of, which means it’s not the ideal environment for everyone, especially if you are looking for a very structured experience. Nobody is going to hold your hand. Everybody is swamped, and there's no right way to do anything. The org is really working to make this more even, but the environment favors people who can advocate for themselves. It can also be a really uneven experience—your New America experience will be heavily dictated by the people & culture of your team, and there's a ton of variety there. If you want to know more about working at the org, your best bet is to ask the team you'd be working with (+former members of that team) really good and specific questions about what you can expect. Still, it's a problem that people can have such different experiences within the same organization, as is evident from some of the other reviews. This is a real management challenge—how to create a more standardized working environment while enabling the programmatic autonomy that is so cherished? This has been a management priority in the last 6mos-1year—creating new internal comms and reporting processes. The effect of these remains to be seen. (Re: other reviews, I can't speak to anyone else's experience, but my own experience as POC has been overwhelmingly positive, and it's worth noting that satisfied people tend not to take to glassdoor.
