Pros
There are some definite pros to working at RAND: - Ability to work on interesting topics. - Ability to raise your profile as a researcher in your field, especially since RAND publishes a lot of research. Definite plus on your resume. - Flexible work hours and flexibility on forming teams. - No "pigeon holing" of staff into only doing certain tasks or research areas. - A few, but highly competitive chances to pitch ideas for new research funded internally by RAND. - High degree of autonomy.
Cons
At the same time, there are SIGNIFICANT downsides to working at RAND and I do not recommend to my friends that they work here. I have only worked on the national security side, but here is what I have observed or experienced: - Internal labor market that creates significant anxiety and significant amounts of unpaid time reaching out to principal investigators. This is a substantial "tax" that is not discussed about the internal labor market. There is also significant unpaid time spent on developing new project ideas. - Maladaptive strategies such as hoarding coverage and coalescing into "mafias" that defend turf and are hard to break into. See: Project Air Force. - All risk is on the researcher to find work, bring in work, and cover their own time. This crowds out the ability to invest in developing skills. - Risk adverse management working for risk adverse defense clients. Add the fact that RAND seems to be in a time warp and behind on methods, and this is not a formula for innovation. Managers literally refer you to the same three methods that RAND has used for years. - Emphasis on bringing in your own project work from clients, which can lead to not having the best qualified people work on a project, purely out of survival. Who you know in the Pentagon, rather than research skills, is what is important as you try to bring in money. - Emphasis on operating as a distributed company between locations, even though this is difficult and not ideal from a project perspective. - On the national security side, past emphasis on growth over innovation means the corporate culture is struggling to innovate. The purpose of an FFRDC is not growth. It's to do research no one else is positioned to do. - No mentorship, limited time for professional development, and a sink or swim environment means that despite being surrounded by brilliant people, you are largely on your own. Management seems to consider you a revenue source, not someone to advise or develop. - Hugely ineffective internal bureaucracy with administrative staff who are sometimes downright hostile, ineffective, and unresponsive. Why does it take three days to fill out a form? Who knows. A wide variety of process differences throughout RAND make each program or center procedures idiosyncratic and inscrutable. - Internal labor market means that people who signed up for your project can suddenly decide there are off to a more interesting project, leaving you in the lurch, AFTER having spent project money on them to get spun up. - The high cost of overhead is an enormous problem and causes complaints from both researchers and sponsors. - The cost of senior staff means there is an incentive to "thin slice" project funding and only give them the minimum time possible. This means your most experienced staff are often only given small amounts of time on projects, priced out of the internal labor market, have had their hours reduced, and are not used for valuable mentoring or to their full capabilities as researchers. They are also given no time to learn new skills. I feel like I'm watching elderly researchers being put out on ice floes when they are no longer as useful. It's not a future that inspire confidence or builds morale. (If it happens to THESE brilliant people who have given years of their life to RAND, what's going to happen to ME?) - The constant juggling of projects that may come in at random times means there is a tendency to overcommit to projects to avoid gaps in coverage. Between this and the constant multi-tasking between projects, it is nearly impossible to focus. If you think being at an FFRDC means you have time to think deeply about policy problems, don't kid yourself. - Again, large amounts of unpaid work, which really sucks. There are many activities that can't be billed to a project, so you have to suck it up. - Although you could theoretically work on a variety of topics, this does not always happen in practice. You are still more likely to get work in areas where you have previous experience, so the ability to branch out can be a little misleading. - A steady stream of bright-eyed, hopeful new staff who meet with you to try and get on your projects in a hugely inefficient process that often only yields little. Their dreams will be crushed soon enough, and you have no work for them anyway. - Performance reviews that also depends on how much money you bring in. This is unavoidable anywhere these days, but even at RAND, all is forgiven if you bring in money. It's not clear to me that some of these projects are what RAND should be focusing on - for-profit contractors would be fine for some of this. - The matrix organization means that the departments who hire you are not the managers you end up working for. This is important since in most organizations, a specific manager will want to hire you for a reason and usually has a vision for how you would fit in. Instead, you are launched into an environment where you are trying to work for managers who many not be interested in your personal research strengths, and who have no vested interest in you being professionally successful.
