Pros
You get to practice at the very top of your clinical field. You could work here for 30+ years (many people do) and still not see it all. There's infinite learning opportunities with these complex patients. If you got into healthcare to truly help people and make a difference, this is the place to be. It changes your outlook on life to work with these patients and experience the true meaning and limits of human resilience. It's hard to work at any other hospital after working at Shepherd because other places are just missing that "X factor" of the sense of mission and the people who truly care. You can really feel the good energy just walking through the halls, that may sound like some marketing BS but it's actually true. Every time I come back to work at Shepherd I feel like I'm coming home.
Cons
It's a hard job. Because of how complex the patients are, you work twice as hard as you would at other hospitals for the same pay. There is definitely a family atmosphere, but just like real-life families the culture can be secretly kind of cutthroat and full of drama at times. Everyone who works here is proud of how much they know and the skills they have learned; they hire a lot of people who want to be the "smartest person in the room". And those people expect you to be on top of your game or you can go work somewhere else. It leads to amazing outcomes for the patients but it can be stressful at times. Despite these cons I'm STILL giving it 5 stars; you have to understand this stuff just comes along with the nature of what Shepherd is, it's not like a normal hospital. You accept some of these downsides because you want to work at the best place around.