1. VT honors the military culture and chain of command, which means in your day to day work routine you will have to navigate this through waiting for approvals, forms, and routing trivial things to many people for their input/changes.
2. Due to it's long history of intentional exclusion and Southern culture, VT is not as diverse as its higher ed peers across the US. A small group of people are trying to change this but it is difficult and slow. It doesn't help that VT tends to hire VT alumni, so the staff aren't invested in change because they haven't seen it at other places.
3. Blacksburg is boring, especially for young, single professionals.
4. Faculty are overextended and stressed out, same as any other institution of higher ed, and working with them is challenging
5. managing budgetary pressures and bureaucratic redundancies are part of the job
6. VT is big and complex and you will never really be effective or understand what is going on beyond your little pocket of work unless you invest A LOT of time and energy educating yourself about the activities and outcomes beyond your unit. It is basically a second job figuring out what is going on around you and how it effects your work and planning for the future.
