Center for Strategic and International Studies Reviews

I think there are three major cons to working with CSIS. (1) From an employment point of view, they rarely keep their side of the labor agreement. From talking with other interns and new employees, many are promised that if they take low wages (many that are sub-minimum wage), experts will give them lots of career advice and connections so that after your tenure, you will have many opportunities. Plain and simple, this does not happen for 75% of people I met. Most end up having to find opportunities completely on their own. The main reason to take an entry or intern level position here would be for good experience, mentorship, and connections. The only thing you get is experience, but most of that can be attained by just reading reports and going to events. From a transactional point of view, there's little reason to work here; only do if you know for certain that a certain team or expert has a track record of really investing in younger staff development. (2) The culture is overly professional and militaristic in its strictness. This probably stems from the CEOs background in the military but is totally unwarranted in a research environment. You will be reprimanded for not wearing a suit AND tie everyday, for being even 5 minutes late, and -- to my worst surprise -- for asking questions to experts. I was specifically told that CSIS is not an environment where I'm allowed to raise questions (privately, too, not publicly) of an expert's research. It's a heads down environment everyday. Considering the wage, industry, and CSIS's own outward facing branding of being innovative, this is totally out of place and ineffective towards its research goals. (3) I met many young people who joined the institute out of a hope that research can help improve some aspect of global society. Many left jaded. CSIS may be nonpartisan as a whole, but its teams are small and often individually dependent on funding. This means that the few funders of each team have a disproportionate say in driving research agenda and (in private meetings) not-so-subtly indicating what kinds of conclusions they hope to see from research. There *is* a decent amount of truly nonpartisaned research being done, but a *very* significant portion is a distorted version of corporate propaganda. This is why some elected representatives have called for think tank donations to be made public. I became jaded for working in the think tank space - but I'm still hoping to find other avenues for change. If your goal is to do research or drive positive change in the world, you won't have very much opportunities at CSIS, even if you have a few. For the wages and 1950s corporate culture, it's clear that this institute isn't worth most people's time. You might as well go for a consulting firm, or the research arm of a large bank, where you at least have the pay to match the poor workplace conditions.

many junior staff have very negative relationships with supervisors, and those who do are consistently on edge. known violations of ADA. known sexual harrassment.