Pros
1) Tuition Remission is nice and adds a lot to the implicit salary.
2) Work-life balance is typically fairly good. Rarely are you pushing more than 45 hours a week.
3) Depending on your supervisor, you may get decent managering responsibilities quickly.
Cons
1) The pay at GW is significantly below market, especially for quantitative researchers. They try to make up for it with tuition remission but at some point, it isn't worth it.
2) The only way to push one's salary up is to switch jobs within GWU. The annual raise is 2.5%. Managers are able to petition HR to raise it higher but I have never heard of anyone receiving more than 5% and promotions are very rare, even among good managers.
3) Not great for quantitative researchers -- managers are typically more qualitative and thus aren't great at supervision.
4) HR and administration is super slow and often times gets in the way of an efficient office.