Probably great if you've never worked anywhere else - Content Writer Purdue University Employee Review

Partner and I moved here after being granted opportunities that sounded too good to be true, turns out they were. We have heard all of this raving about how fantastic a place Purdue is to work - this may be the case if you are working closely with the STEM-oriented departments, staff, and faculty, but it couldn't be less true for us. Outside of their science and engineering capacity, Purdue is kind of a nothing-entity. The staff-level people in my area do not work hard at all, and it seems like few individuals who work in communications, marketing, media, advertising, etc. don't have much practical experience at all. I have never worked at a job where I have felt so strongly that I have greater experience than my own supervisors as well as the leadership in general at my organization. I think this is mainly because many of the people who work at the staff level at Purdue basically came from the West Lafayette area, and they've just stayed here forever. So even in a lot of the supposedly "fast-paced" and "hard working" departments, people really have no clue about how organizations of this size in other parts of the country operate. As a result the leadership strategy is oftentimes very smallminded, uninventive, and lazy. Much of the communication strategy seems overly reliant on the continued popularity of President Daniels, which is fine under some circumstances. But the truth is that, at a university of this size, many of the institutions operate basically independently of the higher-level administration and have little to nothing to do with them. As a consequence many of the departments are off in their own little world, and they are completely ill-equipped to develop their own strategy. They're coasting by on their own inertia. Couple the uninspired leadership with substandard pay in many areas and a retirement plan that is basically useless to a young person (Purdue doesn't contribute any money until you've been on the payroll for a minimum of 3 years), and you end up with a university whose main pull at the staff level is largely middle-to-lowbrow Gen Xers who are technologically illiterate, and Boomers who don't want to work that hard in the back end of their careers. A university of this size and influence should be doing much more to pull in innovators and hungry young people, and instead those people are often put in positions that are intentionally designed to have no room for growth. I personally don't think this bodes well in the long-term.