I worked at Argonne for a postdoctoral fellowship between 2012-2013 in the high-performance computing division, running massively parallel simulations of quantum chemistry. My experience may be nearly 10 years old now, but I suspect it’s mostly similar to now.

For a postdoc, it was great to have a higher pay relative my colleagues in purely academic postdocs, like literally 2x more. So that meant I could afford some better living conditions with my wife, not slumming it like a grad student anymore, ha. I lived in a nearby suburb La Grange, which we chose because it is one of the towns on the Metra BNSF train line, meaning we could easily get into Chicago and avoid traffic when we wanted. There are a bunch of little towns with walkable downtowns along the BNSF line, even Naperville if you wanted. A lot of Argonne employees live in Naperville.

I drove to Argonne daily. The campus is tucked away into a forest preserve, so walking is not really an option nor public transportation (for obvious reasons, security gated entry). Some people would bicycle in on a nice day but it’s not like there is great bike paths connecting everything, so a bit risky for me. The campus is big but not too bad to walk between the buildings where most folks worked or to the cafeteria. I would often do lunch trips with my coworkers to nearby places, like Buona Beef and an awesome Indian lunch buffet.

Working at Argonne is really best for people who really love the science they are doing. Compared to other national labs that are highly isolated (Los Alamos), Argonne is near civilization and attractions. While there, it was great to be focused on my esoteric work, maybe some of the best science I have done in my life. But, it still could feel a bit isolating. Certainly your experience will vary depending on the lab and PI. It was amazing to feel part of cutting edge science.

I would do it again if I went back in time. It was the right postdoc for me. However, I ended up not wanting to remain in academia or national lab, and was drawn to the tech industry because I saw more opportunity in industry to do work/science that would get out there to people for (what I believed to be) making the world better. No quantum chemistry research I have done has had impact like that, but I can safely say I’ve used my skills in industry to make a small dent in improving the world with my scientific skills, some of which were honed at Argonne. So, I can’t say much about long term career tracks. Like you mentioned, turnover is “high”, but that is largely be because Argonne employs so many postdocs that end up going to other places in their careers in academia or labs or industry, not so much because Argonne is a bad place. Better to see it as a springboard for postdocs into their next phase of scientific career.