Pros
- Free food and housing - For me, the pay was good, considering that I had almost no bills. I was able to save a lot of money. - The curriculum is pre-written, so you don’t have to lesson plan. The curriculum is mostly really interesting and fun to teach. - There is training on how to teach the curriculum, and you can study with the curriculum binder if you want to. Often, they have people team-teach in the first couple weeks. It’s not guaranteed, but you’ll be fine teaching on your own since you were trained on it. - You don’t have to pay for your supplies. That seems obvious, but if you were a teacher before this, then it’s an upgrade. - There’s lots of places to explore on your breaks. It’s a scenic area. There’s trails and a treehouse. There’s a pond. - There’s a duck and pigs. - People are mostly nice and there’s a sense of community. It’s a good way to make friends. - Leadership is hired from within, so you have a chance of advancement. - The kids are great. They make you laugh! It’s super fulfilling - The retreat management was great. They were the sort of people who make you actually want to work because they treat you like a human being.
Cons
- It’s hard to have a work life balance when you live with the people you work with and the hours are long/overnight. - They say at the interview that you don’t need a car. You don’t absolutely need one, but it’s more convenient if you have one. The bus to the pharmacy is unreliable and it can be hard to get a ride back home at night if everyone else is in cabin. Eventually, leadership will help if you ask. - Leadership is really young and doesn’t always communicate well. You will call procord and they will sound annoyed and tell you to call available leadership for that sort of thing. So you call available leadership next time and they tell you you should have called procord. And it just repeats. - Sometimes the expectations are unclear and it seems like leadership isn’t on the same page either. You don’t always know what a rule is until it’s been broken. - You find out your schedule for the next week on the Friday or Saturday before, and it changes. Since don’t know when your breaks are far ahead of time, it can be hard to schedule appointments for other things you have going on. But there’s not much procord can do about that, since they can’t predict when people will quit or get sick or if schools ask for changes. It is what it is. - If there aren’t many schools booked, they will have many people just not work for all or half the week. There were multiple weeks when I unexpectedly had no work. I get that there’s a budget, but there were plenty of tasks around camp or training that we could have been doing. -The kitchen sometimes has you serve comically small portions and runs out of stuff and you have to wait a while - Sometimes it felt like upper management didn’t take feedback seriously. For example, we had trouble getting home repairs (such as bedbugs) treated completely and promptly. It felt like you had to make a big deal out of your complaints if you wanted anything to get done.