I worked at Argonne as an intern, and then Idaho National Lab as an intern and then as a full time research associate for a further 18 months. The pace is defi

I worked at Argonne as an intern, and then Idaho National Lab as an intern and then as a full time research associate for a further 18 months. The pace is definitely much slower, and in fact you'll find a lot of people just barely doing their part and kind of hiding in the woodwork, so to speak, which annoys some people to see. You also see that in big corps too of course. I was given an enormous amount of responsibility for being right out of college, which was basically just determined by my boss who had won a grant to do some specific type of research, so he pretty much decided how to spend the money. In retrospect with more experience, I was underqualified for the job, but I had a lot of fun and learned a ton. My boss and his colleagues had to account for their time in something like 15 minute increments, because their time was billed out to their projects. Now, I don't think they actually tracked their time that closely, they more realistically were probably just billing time according to the money they had in each pot to keep the projects going on time. Which brings me to my next point - the labs as far as I could see run as a form of contracting business. They compete for funding from other agencies, like the military, DOE itself, BLM, etc., to do either basic research or applied research. So grant-writing and competition for the next grant is very important. Each principal has to have many grants in the pipeline at all times to make sure their funding doesn't dry up at an inopportune time. This can be stressful I think for people, depending on your role in this process and your personality. In some cases you'd just be working for someone else who had secured all the funding for many years, and in that case you'd never have to worry about that aspect. I see some other comments that not having a PhD means no one listened to you... that wasn't my experience. My boss only had a masters, I had a bachelors, and we pretty much did what we pleased, and decided how to do it ourselves. I'm sure it totally depends on the area you are in and your working group though. I think our group was small enough that none of the PhD scientists gave a damn what we were doing, plus my boss had gotten the funding with his colleagues (all of whom were masters degrees, no PhDs in the group at all), so no one could really say boo to them. I ended up leaving because if you don't at least get a masters you get capped really quickly in what you can do. In my case they didn't have a permanent role for me at all with a bachelors, I was on some kind of extended internship of sorts. I decided to go into industry instead of going for a higher degree.