Pros
Advancement and Ownership: Coming to work at Epic straight out of college I never expected to have so much responsibility and ownership so quickly. Within a year I owned internal projects and improving processes. I was also able to advance quickly by taking that ownership and running with it to provide good outcomes. In less than two years I’ve advanced on my customer team to a higher role and taken on a team leader or TL (management) role in addition to my customer work. It was nice to know my hard work was noticed and rewarded with advancement to more challenging roles. Culture and Colleagues: The culture at Epic can’t be stressed enough. We have a fun campus that makes you look forward to coming to work and inspires creatively and team work. It’s also nice to know we’re really making a difference in patient’s lives across the country. This is reflected in the company motto of Do Good, Have Fun, Make Money (in that order). Finally, working with other fun and intelligent people makes a big difference. I’ve become friends with most of the people I work with and it’s nice to feel like everyone is contributing to a project and dead weight isn’t just shuffled back and forth around the company because we only hire the best and brightest.
Cons
Time and Life Management Skills: These are crucial and you won’t last long or be happy without them. Because you’re given so much responsibility right away you need to quickly learn to prioritize, manage tasks, meet deadlines, delegate tasks, and effectively badger people to keep the project on tasks. When you’re dealing with a project this large and important there are always lots of things going on and if you don’t have these essential skills you’re going to struggle. With travel and sometimes long hours (depending on customer’s timeline) it’s also important to learn life management skills quickly. When you’re traveling and working long hours at the hotel for a week or two it’s good to learn to let it go on the weekends and enjoy a social life so you don’t get burnt out. This can also mean working shorter hours when you’re not traveling to spend time with family/friends and get things done at home. Some people struggle with this work-life balance which causes them to burn out.