Pros
-Worked with a great team of friendly, knowledgeable, and professional individuals. -Good place to start your career out of college, tons of job openings usually. -Tons of great learning experiences, welcoming atmosphere for those willing to learn new things. -Benefits like free schooling and health care are solid. -Most staff are friendly enough. -Inclusive, but inclusive because I believe our country's social climate demands it to be, not because it's genuine. -Employees here overall are hard working. The hardest working individuals usually get a year or so of experiences and then transfer out, turn over rate is pretty high (reasons why explained in the cons section).
Cons
-Pay here is severely lacking. Department heads have no power in negotiating a better salary for you, HR allegedly is holding back exceptional and hard-working employees from getting pay they deserve based on an arbitrary grade system they deem is reasonable. If you're an optimistic go-getter looking to get significant raises through hard work and discipline, you will burn out very quickly. I'm confident the turn over rate here is high mainly because of this. -Salaries at BU are infamously low for similar jobs at the market rate. -Your level of education does not matter when it comes to salary compensation; it is very common here for someone who has never been to college to be making the same amount as someone who has a bachelor's or master's degree. Working here can sometimes make you question why you even went through higher education in the first place. -If you are an experienced professional that has years of experience and education in your career that's trying to work your way up, I wouldn't work here. -As I've said in the pros, the benefits are good, but benefits won't matter in the long run if you can not pay for expenses today. This is especially the case with our current dreadful economy. -It's very clear that BU exploits visa students for all they can legally get away with with providing them extremely low income and high amount of labor. -BU does not treat their grad workers well. Multiple times have grad workers gone on strikes and attempted to unionize for better compensation but get shot down by union busting strategies. -Most of the work in my position can be done remotely but was only allowed one remote day. Since this is an in-person institution it gets a pass, however, jobs that can be done remotely should be, and BU's remote policy is very restrictive despite heads of departments getting away with working remote 5 days a week often regardless of this. This sounds like a "crabs in a bucket" mentality but everyone for some reason turns a blind eye to this unfairness. -The work politics here can be insufferable. There's an obnoxious amount of boot-lickers attempting to climb the ladder of success by coddling a department head's ego only to receive a raise that doesn't match inflation rates. -Entitled staff from older generations specifically treat you differently based on your position or "rank" within a department. It was quite tiring to hear grad workers complain about how poorly they were often treated just because they were on the lower end of the totem pole. These department heads of course will get a pass for being an insufferable and entitled "Karen" just because their position is considered valuable. At one point a fair amount of our grad workers informed me privately because of this and would have really thrown a wrench into our team productivity. Hold these individuals accountable! -A lot of the individuals that make higher salaries are usually tone deaf to the complaints of the lower salaried individuals. This creates an unhealthy "us vs. them" mentality between co-workers and keeps the working relationships within a department distant. -"Teamwork" is a big word they use here, but it isn't really a word to describe most departments here. There is usually a high performer that carries a lot of the weight of the department and other lower performers that don't keep up the same pace. High performers will usually get performance punished by being assigned more work and projects they wouldn't have subjected themselves to without further compensation, and lower performers will consistently get a slap on the wrist for being behind. Again, if you're a go-getter that's willing to perform good work and be a resourceful asset for your employer that provides a good service, this institution is not for you. Spend your energy in an environment that rewards you for outstanding performance.
