Psychiatric Neuroimaging
Pros
All these comments are specific to Psychiatric Neuroimaging. The hospital is huge, so I would have no idea whether or not these statements apply to other areas at MGH. -Lots of opportunities to get involved with research projects -Cool speakers/educational opportunities if you look for them -Start with 29 days/year for vacation (also including sick days and holidays) -State of the art resources for neuroimaging
Cons
-The salary is really poor, specifically when you consider how most people are working for more than 40 hours a week -For most labs in my area, CRC's are expected to work on the nights and during weekends if there is a participant that needs to be scheduled -If you are leading analyses/projects, there is a decent chance that the PI will try to downplay your involvement in a study once it comes time to prepare a manuscript... I have heard of at least three situations from different people where they have either been booted or almost booted from the first author position on a manuscript so that someone with more experience in the lab could have the 1st author position, even if this person wasn't very involved in the study. A related positive about the area's misguided authorship allotment, is that there are opportunities to be a random author on a paper even if you didn't play a role in experimental design or analyses. -There is a LOT of low-level labor associated with these jobs. Expect to do lots of tasks like data-entry, calling participants, managing documentation. There are still opportunities to do cool research, but that is most commonly low on the priority list. -I guess this can be a pro and a con - but many labs don't have experts in the different modalities that they work with, so CRCs can at times be given a lot of responsibility for analyses (this is a pro, because it can be a good way to get exposure to new tools and gain new skills, but a con because you end up having to teach yourself a lot from literature and there may be times where you have questions but no one in your lab will have the expertise to answer them) -PIs often have their hypotheses drilled into their head. Because of this, they may want you to redo analyses over and over again with different processing steps until they see something shiny. Sometimes it can come off as a little p-hacky... These comments apply to a decent portion of labs that I have seen, but I would be shocked if they apply to all labs. It seems like there are at least some PI's who are great scientists and truly value their employees' development.
