Pros
The work itself is fun, you basically play and interact with adorable kids. Its very rewarding to watch them learn and grow. Schedules can be very flexible and easily accommodate working students. There's always an abundance of hours available if you want to pick up another kiddo. The pay is OK, again, good enough for a student but hard to make a real living on. They have an experience based scale that determines your hourly wage, however it caps off at a certain level. Basically everyone that you work with, the senior staff, clinicians, and leads are all super nice and friendly. Everyone is almost always willing to give you feedback, guidance, and support.
Cons
All therapy is done in the client's home, so it is often necessary to drive long distances and have awkward gaps between shifts with different kids. This makes it very difficult to work full time hours. Additionally, as you are working in the client's home, the temperament of the child's parents can make or break your shift. I'm saying, a lot of autism is genetic. Therapy can also be cancelled without warning, sometimes the kid is sick, sometimes the family just decided not to tell anyone that they had a vacation planned. It doesn't matter why, because the end result is that you lose those hours and do not get paid. No chance for career growth within the company unless you want to be a senior therapist. Due to changes in funding sources, WEAP is desperately trying to rake in as much money as it can. This means that it will not stop taking on new clients, even though their existing clients often have teams that are only half full. They'll also hire just about any warm body, meaning that if you are the only experienced therapist on the team you'll be constantly training new, very low caliber lines that will likely quit after only a few weeks. And ultimately, its the client who suffers in this situation. Because of these staffing issues, HR has become very overbearing and "pushy" regarding scheduling. Evening and weekend shifts are the least popular but needed the most. So they'll try signing you up for those shifts without consulting you and hope that you'll just agree to it.
