Pros
Great place to get your career started and pick up lots of skills with a sharp learning curve under lots of patience. The expectation that you'll start of slow is set early on and the focus is on doing things right and well so that you're self-sufficient and skilled in the future. It's a really good place to develop the drive to be an analytical and thinker in the working world with lots of transferable skills. -Average compensation for the role -Understanding and kind coworkers -Interesting People -Flexibility in throughout the day for appointments/obligations
Cons
Don't stay too long or you'll grow resentful. Not only is big pharma a boring and terrible industry to work for, the upper management is passively toxic in terms of how they manage their people/resources. This is consulting and the profit margins and client happiness matters after all, but I didn't expect it to be this bad. All my projects start off the same, with a reasonable scope and timeline written on paper and it sounds like I'll finally get a reprieve from my long hours and high pressure. Then we speak to the client on week one and they want everything expedited and more than was initially agreed. The fire starts to burn then and everything is done sloppily and we crawl across the finish line. The next project comes along for the same client and they have to drudge through the mess we made in our haste causing additional hours for both teams. Project managers are typically spineless and don't push back on clients, they much rather please the client and burn their junior staff. With a polite tone, they'll reject any suggestions from junior staff and are so unaware of the burden they're putting on us. -Long hours -Boring repetitive projects -Unmotivating to work for big pharma -Unrealistic and delusional timelines