Pros
This review is tailored to anyone considering the campus program, but perhaps others can gain from it. Learning experience: the work you’re given as a junior associate may not be challenging, but you’ll get to see the ins and outs of projects, and see what makes projects go good/bad and delivered at a loss. First week of training: you’ll meet coworkers from across the country as the first “orientation week” has new hires meet at one office, with travel/food/etc paid for you for this week. You’ll go out to dinner and drinks with them after and have career-long friends. Honestly my favorite week at the company to this day. PTO policies: good luck finding another entry level job that gives you an unlimited PTO policy. Many entry level jobs give you a terrible accrual rate, and that makes you count sick days against those accrued days. There is however, a con to this (see below). Being hourly: as a junior associate you are hourly. If you work over 40 hours, you are compensated accordingly, but don’t expect this to happen frequently. Office environment: varies by office, but there’s things like beer taps and some dog-friendly offices, ping pong/foosball tables, etc. People are generally great too. You’ll get to see people in your discipline at different points in their career, and potentially put yourselves in their place and think if you do/don’t want to be in their position in the future. Soft skills: in addition to being on projects developing whatever skills you got hired for, you’ll also get great practice on your soft skills. This is especially the case at this company because you may be the only one in your office on a particular project while everyone else is hundreds of miles away. Bench: it’s inevitable from time to time, but the nice thing is that there’s no penalty to you for being on the bench (which means idle/not on a project) as there is to salaried employees. That’s because you’re not bonus-eligible at the entry level.
Cons
Compensation: You will probably have a more competitive offer salary-wise. What you were offered by other companies is probably what you’ll get come time for your first promotion (~1.5 years, hopefully). It’s not uncommon for an entry level employee here to be paying over 50% of their take-home pay on housing, with the remainder going to student loans, food and other living expenses, with basically nothing left over to save for emergencies. You’ll hear people tell you in college to allocate your money as 30% housing, 20% savings, and 50% necessities. That just doesn’t happen here. On-boarding: after the first orientation week, varies by office. No uniformity. PTO: let’s be real. You’re an entry level employee, you can’t afford exciting/long vacations. So you may realize that you’d rather the extra salary at this point in your life. Tech policy: you won’t get the best equipment, probably something 3-4 years old with damage. During training, new hires couldn’t keep up with instructions because of slow computers. Even when given newer laptops, you’ll still see new hires bringing in personal ones so they can actually be productive. Longer term employees complain they can’t get new ones unless they genuinely do not power on, being “super slow” doesn’t cut it. Interview day: in the interview process, you’ll have to go to your office of choice for a day of interviews. Travel to that office is NOT REIMBURSED. If you have to fly and stay in a hotel, that’s on you. This policy shuts out candidates who can’t afford the travel. If you’re looking at an office near where you go to school, obviously this won’t be a problem.