Pros
Coworkers have been great. If you plan on staying for a long time moving up is possible. If you go to school at OSU while employed full-time they will pay for your school. They pay half of OSU tuition for kids of employees. This benefit is good, but unfortunately it factors into your benefits package and is part of OSU's justification for paying lower salaries even though most employees never use it.
Cons
Ohio State does anything and everything to extract money from people. As a student they charge you outrageous tuition and fees. Immediately after graduating they contact you to donate money to the school and as an alumni they never stop hounding you for donations. As an employee, you are required to pay for parking. These are OSU lots, they are not competing with anyone else for these parking spots yet OSU puts its' cost onto the employees. OSU pays less than competitors and says it's because of the "great benefit package". The benefits are good surely, but do your homework, ask around to people you know at other big companies and you may find that OSU's benefits aren't actually that much better than other big companies. OSU boasts a 14% matching contribution to your retirement account. This can be a great benefit that can offset the lower salaries but be careful. You will default into one of the OPERs retirement plans and in these plans about 33% of that 14% is wiped out by mandatory fees. In the traditional pension plan you have to be at OSU for 5 years before you are 33% vested in your account and for 10 years to be 67% vested, but the remaining 33% is always wiped out for fees. The Alternate Retirement Plan is the best way to keep this great benefit they boast about. The 14% contribution becomes around 13% in this plan and you are completely vested after just 1 year. This way if you get fed up like me you can keep the money that they try very hard not to give you. There are two job classifications at OSU, CCS and A&P. CCS employees are essentially second class employees. They have outdated job titles straight from the 1950's. They have stricter policies that can lead to disciplinary action. They get less vacation time. They need to put in many more years of service at OSU than A&P people to get bumped up to more vacation time levels. Red tape abounds at OSU. Change is rare and anything that gets accomplished takes a very long time to do it. A key example of red tape is when I found myself not very busy with my job. I found a simple way I could help my team and take some of their work load. I presented it to my boss. Their response was that I couldn't because it wasn't in my job description. I had never encountered a situation where I asked a boss for more work and they said anything other than, "sure, thank you for the help."
