Pros
Overall, the Paraxel Baltimore EPCU is a decent place to work if you're just starting out. I worked there for years, and enjoyed it most of the time until recently. The real benefits working here as a Research Associate are: flexible work schedules, low stress, tuition reimbursement, and the ability to move up quickly if you get along with managers. Many people work entry level positions like Research Associate here as their gateway into the medical field (CRC, Project Management, nursing, PA, MD, etc.) while they finish college or adjust to post-college life, and it works well for that purpose. Most of the actual employees are pretty nice and teach you a lot, though among some floor employees there seems to be an ongoing contest of seeing who can do the least work in a day.
Cons
There are a lot of cons working here, including: the lack of a meaningful sense of purpose (corporate preaches its motto of doing things "with heart" but cuts corners for profit at every turn), unreasonable technician-patient ratios on busy days, favoritism between certain staff members and managers, and the tendency to allow questionable clientele into the unit as research participants for the sake of filling study cohorts (most of whom have been in prison or have mental issues, and have a history of harassing employees). Employees are also sick with COVID19 left and right. Why? Because the unit is flying and busing in people from all around the country to enroll in their studies as research participants, and then packing them in like sardines 15 participants to a room. In my opinion, there's no excuse for this; we work with healthy volunteers, we're not providing any essential life-saving medical services that would warrant this behavior. The overarching issue, though, is that upper-level corporate management tends to make a lot of top-down decisions without consulting the Baltimore unit. This is because Parexel was recently bought out by venture capitalists at Pamplona Capital Management, who want to make the company as profitable as possible and potentially sell it off later on. This has resulted in: reducing employee sick time, switching to an "unlimited" time off system (which actually means no accrued PTO and no guaranteed vacation so that corporate can save money), cutting end of the year holiday parties (they used to rent out the National Aquarium or the Baltimore Ravens Stadium to reward employees for their work every year, but no more), and pretending that the COVID19 pandemic isn't happening by filling the unit to over-capacity in order to complete studies and make a profit. I cannot tell you how many times floor employees have received emails from corporate informing us of some new cost-cutting change, and it seems like the first time myself AND my managers are finding out about it.