postdoctoral research associate

research scientist

r&d engineer

technical analyst

scientist

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

ORNL is one of the leading companies in East Tennessee to work, and if you get hired, consider it a blessing.  I was an administrative assistant for many different groups and divisions. I worked on (overall overview of all jobs I had) procedures, operating guidelines, set up interviews and passes for interviewees, processed paperwork for new positions, had P-card responsibilities, proofed conference proceedings, tracted staff hours on projects, processed visitor passes and foreign national passes and paperwork, set up meetings and managed schedules for managers/group leaders, received guests, set up major meetings, worked as a user assistant in the user office where I entered proposals in the system and tracted statistics for DOE reporting, used all ORNL internal systems: SAP, AVID, PAS, and oher major systems, coordinated summer students orientation, set up filing system for and duplicated historic drawings into an engineering database, managed two fellowship programs and tracted statistics, assisted with conferences, took and transcribed meeting minutes for staff, and general administrative responsibilities. There is a great gap between weekly (administrative) and salaried positions where salaried are allowed extra privileges because they are salaried whereas weekly people are 40 hours a week. Attitudes toward administrative staff ranges from great respect to apathy depending for whom you work.  There is not much advancement for administrative staff unless they bid out on higher ranking jobs.  Your compensation level is not always clearly explained and many times you are just told you are a group secretary. Some divisions leave too much authority to division secretaries which can become very political and can damage lower ranking administrative staff's reputation with higher management and chances of any possible advancement. Many managers have no clue what their admins do and do not prepare professional yearly reviews.  You more or less have to toot your own horn.  However, training and educational assistance programs are great.  Benefits are excellent and overall the atmosphere is good.  Again, it really depends on who you work for, and like any company you will have positive and negative features.  Overall, I loved the variety of nationalities I worked with and the staff at the Lab are great. Most folks are just plain folks and good people.  Overall, I worked for and with wonderful people and had positive experiences. There are also great cafeterias at 3 different locations of the Lab, plus workout faciilities. Also the cafeteria organization provides excellent catering for meetings and retirement parties. Also, when I was there, the Medical Division was a great benefit especially if you were sick and couldn't see a doctor. Also, I thought it was wonderful that they provided a dietician and workout specialist for employees. Also, you can have confidential couseling if needed. ORNL is a wonderful company for young professionals in research, homeland security, computer science and engineering fields. I would recommend any young people pursing careers in these field to apply for internships with ORNL.  If you are administrative and not wanting to move up the ladder or out of the admin field, it is not so lucrative. But the salary is excellent and as previously stated so are the benefits.  I do miss working there, mainly I miss the wonderful people. Also, ORNL is improving their programs for administrative staff.

The grounds are beautiful with a campus look and feel. There is a lot of diversity with interns, researchers and employees from all over the country converging in Oak Ridge. There are mind-blowing cool things that the lab is involved in (public/private partnerships, collaborations, the world's biggest supercomputer, new materials innovations, etc.). They are active in the community and have several volunteer projects designed to give back.

There is a culture of innovation, pride and funding in the research areas, supported by executive management. Not so in the IT Division.

IT in general did not seem valued by Management and it's a shame."The system" bred a culture of mediocrity in a group of really good, hardworking people who wanted to do more.

1. When there is not enough personnel to support the basic services and functions, it is impossible to innovate.

2. When there is not enough funding to implement (properly) the tools and software needed, it is impossible to be proactive instead of reactive to the changing IT landscape.

3. When employees are told (literally I was told this) that the annual performance ratings given are going to be mostly mediocre across the division no matter how hard they work, it breeds mediocrity in otherwise stellar employees. 

4. When some of the mid-level managers do not keep up on new technology, are afraid to hire people smarter than they are and then let the smart people advise them (rather than the other way around) it is impossible to innovate.  (This is slowly being fixed through attrition as the 'old timers' retire out and new people with fresh ideas are being hired in.)

The often spoken and always implied ethos among the average IT support staff was to do just the minimum to get by and care less about projects and goals. It was a survival tactic. I watched many people join IT full of excitement, energy, new ideas and then have all that excitement drained out of them. 

I believe that is management's fault and a sad state when the mission of the place is so remarkable. It's a beautiful  place with a lot of great, smart, hardworking people. It's a shame that management is willing to throttle them down to mediocrity.

Started my career writing accounting software to charge back software for computer resource usage of VMS machines.  Later I was needed to write the same type of software for charge back of UNIX (ULTRIX) accounts.

Other Unix software included inactivity disconnect of interactive login processes and password updates.  The password update system had to be able to update distributed accounts from DES encrypted data sent from an IBM mainframe.  Data decryption had to be done in memory and never written to disk which required the software to be written in assembly.

When PC networks were added to IT, I was responsible for designing software to search the distributed mailing system of Banyan Vines for classified data that was inadvertently mailed on the network. This software would accept a regular expression and return parts of messages that satisfied the expression and allow the user to confirm that this was the data being searched for.  The user would then instruct the clients to overwrite the confirmed messages with a bit pattern which would totally remove any trace of the data on all mail servers.

I also wrote an inactivity disconnect client for Banyan Vines.

The last two years of employment was developing UI and server software for the ARM project (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement). This entailed a UNIX daemon service which would retrieve files from robotic storage repository using UniTrieve and an X-Windows and Web CGI UI which allowed scientist to log-in and retrieve data from the repository.

Working as a GIS analyst type role at ORNL allowed me to grow a lot in technical areas because of the diversity of the projects available and the opportunities to collaborate with different researchers within your group. The management is difficult to assess because there is a hierarchy of group leaders, then section leaders, then division leaders, then directorate leaders, then the lab director. My most frequent interactions are with my work colleagues and I mostly work at the direction of individual project leads, not necessarily tied to the lab's hierarchy. I have had positive experiences of my interactions with my project leads and group leader, but have had little to no interaction with higher leadership.

There are also times when due to the nature of the work, there are deadlines for reporting or publications or progress which create an environment where I feel guilty not working over 8 hours a day, which is negative I would say.

Additionally, at times it feels that the research publications are being written in order to justify the expense of the research, almost as proof that the project is valid, rather than as a genuine explanation of scientific discovery or progress. This leads me to not like to contribute to publications, which is somewhat of a requirement for projects at the lab.

When I started working here this was a great place to work. Over the years the current Lab Director has destroyed the lab’s long term success prospects. Let me explain. 

There have been several cost cutting forced retirements that were never back filled. All the work from retired staff fell squarely on the shoulders of the mostly younger staff that remained. I do at least what used to be 4 people’s jobs for a single lower salary. Effectively? Hardly. I can’t be expected to pull the contribution of four staff members but that’s what they expect. The pay has become increasingly less competitive as more responsibilities have been added to my plate without enough increase in pay. 

The director frequently sends out mass emails showing how out of touch he is with staff members. He offered one hour a month to respond to the terrible staff feedback he received recently. That shows how much he cares about staff members.

If you want to work in facilities go elsewhere. You’ll be underpaid, overworked, and pestered by the incompetent employees that remain. 

This is a highly undirected research environment. There are no deadlines, very flexible hours, and no clear goals. Your only mission as a post-doc is to produce papers to make the lab a success and aid in the approval of future grants. You need to be someone who is very driven and motivated about your research. Otherwise 75% of post-docs end up leaving the lab after their two-year tenure.

If you are good at reaching out to others in an environment where almost everyone is flying solo, if you are good at writing papers, if you are good at driving yourself, if you can avoid getting stuck in a  slow line of research, if explaining what you do at conferences excites you, if you need to be working at the highest-levels of understanding .. then this is the place for you. 

On the other hand, if you want clearly defined goals, if you aren't interested in being stuck in a single line of research for years, if you want fast-pace, if you want to feel an immediate, broader impact to society, if you want job security .. then this place is not for you.

Also, it's a government lab. So the services can't be too bad and they also can't be too good. No one wants to see government employees getting free lunch or having google-style perks. It's definitely better resources and pay than a university post-doc though.

My awful experience working here was not limited to myself, or my team. It spanned multiple groups and went all the way from the administrators to the lab director and DOE. They have some FUNDAMENTAL issues that are being buried, ignored, and perpetuated. Half of the work force is coasting to retirement while making great money. With little ability to let go on anyone, the amount of employees that under performers and would have been let go from a regular, industry job is high. Meanwhile, those who do perform raise the bar for themselves and end up carrying the weight of their team on their backs. Support staff (ie not grant-money generating) are neglected and under-appreciated. HR and reimbursement have gotten so bad that they will lie and make promises they cannot keep in order to hide how badly the lab is doing and how little they can offer people. If you get a verbal offer from them, do not act until getting anything in writing, they are that unscrupulous. If you want to work for a National Lab that is being run like a Used Car dealership, this is the place for you!

The biggest problem with ORNL is that you are always challenged to find money from federal agencies so that you stay off overhead.  Unlike National Laboratories in other countries, our national labs required staff to constantly search for new government sources of income.  It is a real problem especially since national labs are prevented from competing with the private sector.  Also the labs have very high overheads because the operating contractor has to make a profit.  Many federal agencies rather work with the private sector because their dollars go further even the quality of the work is not very good.  The only area that you are relatively secure in at the national labs is those lab organizations that are monitoring or developing nuclear weapons.  Their budgets are stable from year to year.

The higher your salary, the more money you have to bring into cover the increase because your burn rate increases. The Labs will support you on overhead for a while, but there is a limit to what they will do.  At some point you will be laid off.

Without the money chasing, the labs would be a great place to work.  It is unfortunate that our government is so short-sighted.

Management running this place into the ground. Lying and empty boasting are relentless, with nothing to show for. Leadership is all political and authoritarian. None of them would be able to survive in private sector. Everything is understaffed, over budget, and late. Your coworkers will be great, if they mentally did not checked out and just waiting until retirement. There are many of this type around. There is noticeable attrition lately, people are leaving for greener pastures. Mandatory Covid vaccination hit morale hard.

Your personal experience will depend 100% on who you work for. It can be best job ever or just terrible. The pay is variable. Some make good money for very little work and some work a lot for very little money. Depends on your level and project you work on.

ORNL has great benefits. Medical, Flex Time, Pension, etc. They short change you on vacation, but Flex Time makes up for it. Benefits are the only reason to work here. Don't expect to solve any world's great scientific problems while you are here. 

I arranged meetings and conference rooms for large groups, I scheduled the meetings using Outlook calendar. I also tracked the status of sub-contracts; maintained a database for a growing project using Excel; coordinating on-site and off-site conferences including travel arrangements, set-up and preparing of site, handling registration and fee collections and reconciling of the conference outlay. Preparing for a conference included compiling, assembling and disseminating material; arranged for guest and subcontractor badges. Other administrative duties included: travel arrangements (domestic and foreign trips), prepared documents for publishing, and entered them for approvals, edited Web pages. I prepared documents using internal system for contracts; ordering material using the AVID (on-line) System; the SAP System for budget information; and track subcontract milestones deadlines. I am proficient in the use of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook). I also prepared items for domestic and foreign shipping.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Postdoctoral research associate 11 salaries reported	$87,091 per year
Research scientist 5 salaries reported	$138,200 per year
R&d engineer 8 salaries reported	$127,450 per year
Technical analyst 16 salaries reported	$139,896 per year
Scientist 4 salaries reported	$176,500 per year

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