Vantaggi
CASE was my first job right out of school, and was honestly the best 'trial by fire' experience I could have asked for. Having coworkers that cared about me as a designer, my career goals, and me as a person truly made the team feel like family. Being a small agency, everyone had to wear several hats—which is great if you like working on a variety of projects—and which taught me to work efficiently. If you took all of the people who did all of the work on group projects in school, and started an agency, you'd have CASE. I had a lot of one on one coaching from my manager, as well as the partners so I could really pull my weight... and in turn, I was entrusted to help out with some truly amazing projects. That mentoring really helped me in my career and ultimately is what helped me to build my portfolio, and continue onto the next step in my career. If there was a project that sounded really cool, and I had the bandwidth for it, the leadership always gave me the opportunity to jump on it. You get out of it what you put into it. I enjoyed going to work every day, and there probably isn't a better agency for work/life balance in NYC. A lot of people have families, so the leadership was very understanding of personal life "stuff". Good benefits, decent pay, and very little ego. The culture was great, and I will have lifelong friends from my time at CASE. I would (and have) definitely recommend my friends to apply for positions for years to come.
Svantaggi
Amount of work > Amount of people to do the work. There were definitely a lot of fires to put out, and it often felt like the 'new normal' level of stress/intensity just kept getting raised—without any added benefit or compensation to make up for it. I worked there for 2 years, and probably worked on 50+ clients, sometimes up to 12 different projects a day, so it did burn me out quickly. The only other thing that's tough is the opportunity for growth. Since it's a small agency, there's only so much room to grow. And with the opportunity for advancement being so limited, pay increases were hard to come by.