A great place to start your career
Pros
EpiVax is a great place to start off your career. The subject matter is interesting and innovative, management encourages learning and growth within your role at the company, and because the team is relatively small, you get to have a hand in many baskets. As EpiVax says in another review, it’s not an environment for everyone, but for those who want to be able to peek inside the corporate structure, learn about the big picture, and help shape a better company and better healthcare, there are plenty of opportunities. Because the salaries are lower (more on that below) and the office is not in one of the “hubs” of biotech, EpiVax often hires new graduates or young professionals, and considers what they learn to be part of their compensation package. It is not uncommon for employees to learn so much over the years that they leave for a job that pays much more at a larger company. The fact that the CEO is so passionate about creating better medicine is really inspiring, and gives everyone at the office a mission they can feel great about. The salary is decent. It is not competitive with companies in this field that are in Boston or New York, but the cost of living in Providence and RI is also not nearly what it is in these cities. I started as entry level two years ago and I can say that I live comfortably with a roommate. You may run into trouble if you want a fancy one bedroom or are the only salaried person supporting a family. I also know that for their job descriptions, everyone at the company can claim to be “underpaid” relative to the market. It is not the case that upper management makes ridiculously large salaries while entry level employees struggle to get by; that’s just not how it is. The benefits are good: paid holidays, decent PTO (15 days for employees 0-2 years, 20 days for employees 2+ years), flexible work hours, dental, 401(k) with matching, profit sharing (although this has only happened once), etc. They have “core hours” between 10 and 4, meaning you can work from 8-4, 9-5, or 10-6 depending on your schedule/personal preferences which is nice. There is an annual meeting where management shows how much money comes in and goes out, and where it goes, so you can see that most of the money the company earns is going to employee salaries and benefits.
Cons
In general I would say that intra-office communications are not stellar. Our CEO is the spearhead of our Business Development and Sales teams, which means she spends large amounts of time on the road meeting with our clients in Europe and even Japan. This makes communication really important for the rest of the team at the Providence office, and sometimes the team is unsuccessful. The good thing is that the whole office recognizes and agrees that this is an opportunity to improve. While the company is willing to hire new graduates and young professionals and train them up, the management team is older and this generational gap results in a misalignment of work ethics and priorities. No matter how productive you are or how many hours you work, there is always pressure to accomplish more and sometimes the to-do list seems never ending. Work-life balance becomes difficult at times. EpiVax, while having been around for a while, is still a start-up environment. Management wants to create infrastructure for project management, and some progress has been made, but it is difficult because of the inherently custom nature of many of our projects. This sometimes creates confusion with who should be in charge of what/keeping track of what, etc.