Review - Research Assistant Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language Employee Review

On the bright side: Very international center with a lot of diversity. Administrative support for some annoying tasks. Access to medical image equipment for research.

Be extremely careful when choosing this place to work. "We are a family" type of place. Toxic work environment. I have found most work colleagues to be friendly and nice people. However, I cannot say the same for the management guidelines or the leaders and management. It is not a public research center nor a private company. It has the worst of both worlds. They will ask, ask and ask to collaborate with the center tasks without giving anything in return. Expect your salary to be as low as possible according to the law (or even lower if something gets updated and you don't notice. They will forget about it)  There is no transparency in the decisions and budget management. You will find people in your same situation being treated differently just because they are not easily abused. Be extremelly careful if you have your own grant, they take an abusive percentage. It has a long history of exploring the limits of PhDs and RAs. Getting really close to what could be considered labor harassment. Expect hundreds of unpaid extra hours if you have to collect data. But you are lucky, as you won't have to clock in. Despite the well-known name of the center, they have a severe lack of computational resources. You will have access to state-of-the-art MRI, MEG, etc for research. But you will have a lot of trouble processing the data without proper IT resources. Also, the IT team does not care at all about user experience. They will barely do anything to help you solve your problems or understand why stuff does not work. Do not expect your work to be recognized once you leave the center.

Great environment, lots of flexibility

Low salary, that is pretty much it