As a clinical research coordinator, I had contact mostly with physician researchers and research nurses. Although the nurses were much, much nicer than the doctors, they were very often extremely stressed out and took out their stress on each other or the research assistants through demeaning treatment or confrontations. I'm not entirely sure the stress and the way that the doctors sometimes treated nurses and research assistants was really necessary, since I've worked at several highly functioning labs with reputations just as good, if not better, than MGH, where physicians through research technicians treated each other with mutual respect.
The particular lab where I worked in clinical research was a very toxic environment, with employee morale incredibly low, no respect for a work/life balance, and a lack of fairness in how employees were treated. This lab however, is probably one of the worse ones at MGH, and other departments may be much better. Specifically, my immediate colleague had anorexia nervosa, which my superiors had been aware of for some time, but which they did nothing about in terms of making sure she was taking care of herself. The anorexia also meant she was extremely controlling and unwilling to relinquish any of the interesting work to people who were supposed to be her colleagues. I was used to working in labs where people worked as a team, and was disappointed that I and some other junior research assistants were relegated to scutwork. A subdivision of the lab under a few different principal investigators did have research assistants who worked as a team and worked the number of hours that they were paid for (40 per week), however, so my division was perhaps unusual.
All of the research assistants at MGH are paid on a set scale, which is more objective, but that pay scale was about $10,000 less than what I would have gotten paid anywhere else--I know this is true, because I left that job after one year, and found a similar job a few months afterward that really did pay $10,000 more per year. In my lab, and probably in many labs, research assistants were given so much work that they had to stay over, sometimes by as much as 30 or 40 hours a week to finish it, and our job contracts/pay structure were such that we definitely did not get paid for this overtime. At MGH I was paid $10,000 less to do twice as much work as I am doing now, while putting up with unprofessional, appalling treatment by my immediate colleague with an anxiety disorder and a principal investigator who turned a blind eye as long as the work got done.
