Pros
My campaign- when I got work on it, about 40% of the time - was very interesting, very fulfilling, and I had a lot of pride in my work. Lots of learning by doing.
Cons
I joined because I wanted to avoid working for the 2-party system while still shaping policy - turns out TPIN gives large donation to only Democrat political candidates, they just don't publicize it. My job duties looked nothing like my job description, which included research, grant writing, lobbying, and coalition building. However, I spent most of my time on recruitment, recruitment, recruitment because the organization has super-high turnover, and all entry-level employees completely drop their campaigns for months at a time to canvas (15 hour days, no over time pay, lots of union busting). I spent relatively little time on some official duties and was never given a chance to work on research or grants. Not only was I deceived about the job coming in, I was taught to lie to people when I was doing the recruiting- I was directly instructed to omit information on recruitment and canvassing when hiring full-time employees and to omit the fact that our summer jobs were door-to-door fundraising when looking for summer employees. I never understood why we did this, as it wasted a lot of our time training people who dropped out once they figured out what the jobs really entailed. Lastly, the previous negative comments about the culture are correct - dating your coworkers is almost encouraged, but management will honest to God *interrogate you about having a relationship with a non-employee*. Aside from being wildly inappropriate, that's beyond creepy. When I told my boss I wanted to use my vacation time to see family over Christmas instead of spending it on the Aspen retreat, I got a lot of pushback. They really don't like ties to the outside world.