Pros
There's a lot to love at Kessler. The organization genuinely cares about its mission to rehabilitate people with disabilities and people neurological illnesses and injuries. Middle management and study coordinators are very competent, reasonable, and caring. The scientists are excellent at getting grants, which is a testament to their competency and helps promote employment for research staff. Managers and coordinators try their best to take into account your workload bandwidth and try to cater to your interests. There is also a tremendous amount of learning involved in this job, and research assistants typically can get a lot of interaction with participants of various populations over the course of their stay here. This job will definitely let you know if you enjoy research and patient/client interaction.
Cons
Unfortunately, there's also a lot to critique about Kessler. As many of the other reviews have mentioned, the pay is subpar. While it's difficult to gauge what is "market-level" pay for such a position, many research assistants have left for higher-paying positions with the same title or job responsibilities at other research institutions, clinics, and hospitals. It's not uncommon for many of the RAs to also have ancillary jobs. One paycheck as a Kessler RA comes shy from covering rent in or around this area. While this issue has been brought up repeatedly to upper management and is the leading reason for turnover in the position, they have failed to do anything about it and instead have tried to do anything but. They have offered promotions with more responsibilities but little increase in compensation, and they have given minor salary adjustments of a few hundred dollars at a time. Management also touts the organization's benefits, but with a reimbursement plan for dental and optical rather than an insurance plan, employees are required to pay upfront for expenses (they don't always have the means to do so), and this does not help if employees have major expenses needed, such as dental surgery. 401k matching is also not impressive, considering it is a percentage of a very-low salary. Additionally, it seems that some folks in upper management have resorted to posting their own positive reviews in response to reviews from RAs on Glassdoor or other sites. Some even occasionally pretend to be RAs in reviews. Seeing this is very disappointing, as it further discredits those who actually work in this position in order to maintain a good public image. The low pay does not prevent stretching out RAs' work duties, however. For the same pay, a single RA can be divided across 4 or 5 research studies, each being charged a fraction of their full time. The percentage an RA is on each grant is typically independent of how much work is required for that respective grant, allowing for work to be piled onto employees without any marginal reward or recognition. This is never done deliberately or without appreciation from management staff, but it still highlights a lacking incentive structure that makes no distinction between effort and performance amongst employees and inevitably results in lowered morale. Finally, giving sole responsibility to some RAs over data management for a study has often resulted in devastating results. Without a checks-and-balances system, it's become common during an audit for RAs to unearth a mountain of mistakes from previous RAs on the study.