Pros
A good amount of the people you work with are kind, talented, and hardworking, even as their skills are squandered by the company.
Cons
- Toxic work culture. It's expected you that you are constantly praising the company. Any constructive critique of the company process, no matter how minor, will put a target on your back. Your success in the company will depend on having or faking a cult-like devotion to how great Odyssey is. I saw one worker rise from an editorial assistant position to a managing editor position in a few months not because the person was particularly talented or experienced (the person wasn't either of those things), but because the person was eager to push whatever poorly contrived company platitude they announced that week. - Misleading company roles. Your title at the company will be "Assistant Managing Editor" but your job will be identical to an entry level telemarketer. The vast majority of your week will consist of cold calling or mass facebook/twitter/instagram messaging college students to convince them to contribute articles to the site for free. It's a tough sell, but aside from faking an undying loyalty, it is the primary way your job performance is measured. On top of that, you are responsible for editing and publishing hundreds of articles in a two day span at the beginning of the week. The reason so many articles on the site have spelling and grammar errors is not because the editors at Odyssey don't know what they are doing, it's that they are put under impossible circumstances. You'll have absolutely no time to work with individual contributors, even the ones that put in more effort, or actually develop articles. Throughout this process, you'll be forced to pretend Odyssey is some kind of exclusive platform. You'll tell students that they have to "request an invitation to join" the platform, even though you are the one that reached out to them, and even though you are so desperate to meet recruitment goals that they can submit 150 spelling-error-filled words on watching paint dry still be published. There are no filters for quality. A well researched article on civil conflict in Sudan (there isn't a lot of quality writing but occasionally a good writer will come through despite everything) will be sandwiched between an open letter to a sorority sister and poorly formatted listicle on pugs. It's no wonder the Odyssey has an awful reputation among college students (the ones who are not writing for it). - Impossible goals. AME's are given absurd recruitment goals so the Managing Editors have a reason to keep the pressure on you. Let's say you recruit someone. It is then your responsibility to ensure that person contributes every single week, again for free. If they drop out, or cannot write a week, it effects how you are viewed in the company. You will be forced to put pressure on the students themselves to recruit other students, creating a pyramid scheme sounding plan where they recruit people, who then go on to recruit more people, etc. - Poor management. If you are struggling to recruit writers in a certain school or area, the Managing Editors are quick to quick to offer some rehearsed message like "you can do this" or "it's in your control." Maybe they'll recommend reaching out to a social media platform you have already tried multiple times, or they'll recommend changing a word or two in your outreach message. When that fails, they will offer no other help, but blame you nonetheless for not meeting goals. Aside from that, it becomes clear that the Managing Editors have no managing experience whatsoever, and are awful at it. They don't know how to deal with problems at work or how to effectively communicate with employees. Overall company goals shift constantly without proper explanation. The company is massively disorganized and have no real long term strategy for growth (calling college students every week is not an effective strategy). Not long ago the company was unable to meet growth projections and laid off a large portion of the staff as a result. I do not recommend putting your career in their hands. - Bad technology. The company uses a CMS of it's own design that is filled with bugs and crashes frequently. For a startup that calls itself a tech company in public and to investors, this is just sad. As an AME, you will be constantly communicating with your writers that the CMS deleted their article, or is down, or that some bug is causing yet another headache. You will be held responsible if, after all this, those writers decide to just start their own blog on wordpress, a far superior CMS. - No work/life balance. In order to meet the absurd goals you'll have to work over the weekend and at nights, but you'll get no credit for making the effort.