UCLA Reviews

Pros

Very prestigious, working with highly intelligent people motivate me to do my best as well. I made many friends who I found to be helpful.

Cons

Payment could have been better, but I didn't expect too much as an undergraduate student. Thank you for the experience.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the good work, UCLA is the jewel of California and United States and we need to keep producing world leaders.

Pros

- There are a number of employees who are brilliant, extremely talented and kind people.
- Quality reputation from the outside looking in.
- Good benefits

Cons

- Everything you know about bad management is here.
- Funds are constantly inappropriately allocated. Paying high fees to outside contractors where the same (most likely - much better) job can be done in-house.
- Not rewarded or recognized for achievement unless you among the select few who ALWAYS get the pat on the back and some $$ added to their paycheck.
- Huge employee turnaround.
- Inability to think about the future of the organization strategically.
- No opportunity to grow, advance within the department.
- Low salaries for most employees (but high salaries for upper management).
- Relatives, friends and friends of friends of senior leadership get hired for high positions (often incompetent and not qualified for the job), where qualified existing staff isn't even remotely considered for advancement.
- Although there is a huge budget crisis, money is always found when a perfectly fine senior level manager's office needs to be "renovated" and new designer furniture bought.

Advice to Senior Management

Ask yourself, "What have I done that is positive within the last year"?
Ask yourself, "How many extremely qualified individuals have come through these doors and quit? Why did they resign?
Check the pulse of your team once in a while and see how they are doing.
Listen to criticism because your job is not to react but solve issues or make things within the unit work better and employees happier. Happy employees=productivity and progress. Haven't you figured it out yet?!

Pros

Great people; great university; good location; and if you find the right manager, can learn a lot from them about your job

Cons

no room for job growth; all the upper-level management spots are filled or they hire from the outside. either you're just starting your career, or you have years of experience.

Pros

Good environment and pleasant coworkers.

Cons

Difficult to move up and poor benefits.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus more on what is important, such as education, not money.

Pros

UC system is best educational organization. Moreover benefits is not over the average of the industry.

Cons

Traffic and living expense is killing. Promotion is not a option in my branch. Congested.

Pros

You can do anything at UCLA; from bread baker to CFO. There are lots of professional development opportunities and the resources are endless. The right connections could launch your career.

Cons

It is easy to get too comfortable in one position. For those just starting out, I recommend moving around every couple of years to keep your salary going up and expand your network.

Advice to Senior Management

Talk to each other. Find out how your departments can collaborate and minimize the duplication of work. Stop creating new software systems every few years. And find more ways to promote the stars in your department.

Pros

Nice campus environment (if you work on campus - but many positions are located off-campus), availability of convenient university resources (library, rec center, shops and dining, entertainment). The department in which you work is what determines your actual work environment and conditions - and this can vary greatly.

Cons

If you are in a screwed-up department, poor leadership, office politics and completely ineffective work processes may drive you crazy. Don't expect a raise - no raises since 2005, and those were only about 2%. Fight hard for a high starting salary because that's where you'll be for years.

Advice to Senior Management

Clear out the dead wood in middle management. Remake as many manager positions into "working manager" positions - in other words, they have tangible job tasks beyond supervision. There are dozens of $100k managers on campus whose job description appears to be no more than sitting in meetings, gossiping with each other, and turning in reports written by their subordinates.

Pros

good pay for on campus job
great management
you get to meet a lot of very diverse and accomplished people

Cons

you have to work on saturdays a lot, and around finals scheduling can be tight, there is a little bit of micro-managing but overall not bad

Advice to Senior Management

rotate saturday shifts between clerks, all too often all of the clerks will be on staff just sitting around not doing anything, might be more effective to have each person work harder on just a few saturdays rather than twiddle their thumbs on all saturdays

Pros

Some of the brightest minds in the world will be your colleagues
Prestigious medical school
Talented students - both undergraduate and graduate
Many opportunities for scientific inquiries and collaboration between colleagues within your own school and department as well other schools and departments within the UCLA community and the sister UC campuses

Cons

Junior faculty are overworked here in this highly reputable institution which may not be uncommon in other top tier research universities
Funding is tight, making it stressful for faculty to complete their teaching loads and research

Advice to Senior Management

It is hypocritical to speak of budgetary constraints when executive leadership roles are paid so much
Junior faculty are compensated so poorly that many have to take on consulting positions to make their living
Stop cutting into the funding that faculty get from the NIH and other government agencies

Pros

You can find great resources: library access, gym access, etc. You can make appointments with many renown and senior professors with the title of UCLA if they may not pay attention to your inquiry otherwise.

Cons

If you work for professor's project, and the project is already defined, you have to make sure that you are the best fit for the project. It's a tough time in economy, so you want a job, but you should not get a job that does not fit with the subject (again, defined by the professor, not by you) or with the supervisor.

Advice to Senior Management

There are some cases that research assistants or post-docs continuously complain about a specific professor. Then, the department or the university should consider doing something. To tell the professor to change his communication method or ways to assign tasks.