My S25 is applying to Math REUs, and is also hearing about super high demand for positions. Not quite as bad as those physics numbers, but still 20+ applicants per spot. He isn’t feeling super hopeful about it since he is just a freshman (he’s had a few rejections, and is still waiting to hear about a few), but now he is struggling to figure out what to do with his summer if he can’t get something major-related.
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S24 didnt get anything last summer and the only people he knows who did were those who were already in 300 level classes as a freshman and taking the Putnam. He wound up doing an on campus job last summer and many of his friends were counselors at math/STEM summer programs for kids.
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My kid is taking the 300 level math as a freshman…
(Though not Putnam as he is not a competitive math guy!)…But I am guessing his resume is still not as stellar as some freshman applicants.
I think doing something like STEM/Science camp counselor would be a great idea, but we unfortunately have very few campus like that locally at home, and I doubt he would make enough to cover rent and still come out “ahead” if he did it somewhere else (or on the campus where he goes to school, since he lived on-campus this year and would have to pay rent to stay in the summer). Next year would be a different story and he’ll have an apartment lease thru the summer where he goes to school…but hopefully next year he actually will get either an REU or an industry internship somewhere!
If he has to just come home and go back to his high school job over the summer (Chic fil a), maybe he can at least find something remote/unpaid he could be doing for research in his spare time to build a resume. I think it’s hard for him that the last 3 summers before college he had great opportunities to be doing research or other activities that we would consider “resume building” so he really feels like he is spinning his wheels to not be doing anything this summer.
He does still have a couple REU apps out, so all hope is not quite lost yet, but we are definitely trying to brainstorm other ideas.
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There is a polymath jr program that is unpaid and all remote that he could apply to. In the past this had 100% acceptance rate but due to the decreasing number of slots in general, last year they had a 50% acceptance rate.
https://geometrynyc.■■■■■■■■■■■/polymathreu
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OP- suggest that your son look into local non-profits for a “self made” research role. Local hospital? They spit out data every day with neither the capacity nor the skills to figure it out. What’s the average release time for a laproscopic surgery patient, and does the shorter stay correlate with better long term outcomes or is it just a cost-savings move? How many hip replacement patients end up having to redo the surgery, and what can the data tell us about why? That kind of thing. It’s not “math math” but it’s applied math in a very marketable area for next year’s paid internship with a device manufacturer or pharma company. One of my kids discovered that the most valuable skill in an actual paid research role in a lab was…. statistical programming. Not just plug and chug- but a lot of experience with large datasets, Matlab, R, etc. Every research team is going to be churning out numbers of some kind, and the missing link is often having someone there who can interpret the phenomena.
He can balance his own “research role” with his old restaurant job and end the summer with cash AND some practical work experience.
Does your town have a food pantry? They usually have data and do nothing with it (nobody knows how). Someone who can create an algorithm to better match the supply (supermarkets and restaurants donating food) with demand (the unhoused can’t make macaroni and cheese without a stove or a pot) is going to do something very, very valuable for an organization which runs on fumes.
We’re coming up on the midterms. Every single candidate (national, state, local) has a polling operation. Some sophisticated with people with degrees in statistics and applied math, and some that are basically “are we up or down? What do we know about suburban women?” Campaigns are ALWAYS accepting volunteers, and these are great learning experiences.
Good luck to him. This is a very challenging year for summer work….
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I’m speechless at the level of deceit, deception, bullying and intimidation happening inside the CDC.
Why would anyone want to go into public health right now?
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Excerpt:
The Association of American Universities, a group of top research institutions, also found a significant slowdown in funding in its own analysis of NIH data through the end of last month. Lizbet Boroughs, that group’s senior associate vice president for government relations and public policy, said NIH is “considerably far behind.”
“Consequently, many of our universities have lowered the number of Ph.D. students in life sciences that they have admitted this year or admitted them with the caveat that they may not be supported,” Boroughs told Inside Higher Ed. She also said, “Every university that I know of either has RIFed [laid off] employees or has hiring freezes.”
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It isn’t just biomedical researchers who aren’t receiving their grants.
https://www.science.org/content/article/analysis-why-research-money-isn-t-flowing-nsf-and-nih
Analysis: Why the research money isn’t flowing from NSF and NIH
White House review of agency spending plans for this year is causing delays
As Science and Nature have reported, NIH and NSF have made only a relative handful of new grants since their 2026 appropriations became law, partly because of the OMB delays.
What’s happening to NSF now highlights how this year’s process differs. Last month, each account within the agency—NSF has six—received its own apportionment. As is typically the case, there were no strings attached to NSF’s apportionments for its construction and major renovations account, its payroll and operating expenses, and smaller units such as the Office of Inspector General. But NSF’s two biggest accounts—$7 billion for research and $1 billion for science education—came with footnotes that could lead to potentially devastating consequences for researchers.
The footnote accompanying NSF’s research and science, technology, engineering, and math education apportionments, for example, says only that NSF has 15 days to provide OMB with a spending plan. The footnote does not describe what will happen after NSF submits that plan or the extent to which it may be modified. Nor does it set a deadline for OMB to act.
NIH also received its apportionment last month, but with the caveat that it could only be used for salaries and operating expenses. On 4 March, OMB extended that restriction for an additional 15 days and has since only released research funding for some congressionally mandated programs.
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Energy Department merges nuclear and particle physics programs, unsettling researchers
The largest U.S. funder of the physical sciences—the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science—will merge its high energy physics and nuclear physics programs, the agency told scientists this week. Many researchers worry the move may signal a marginalization of both fields as, under the direction of President Donald Trump, the Office of Science pushes into artificial intelligence (AI).
All the physicists ScienceInsider spoke to say they expect their programs to be squeezed to help pay for Genesis, a new DOE effort to use AI to accelerate science, for which the agency recently announced $293 million in funding.
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White House plan to break up iconic U.S. climate lab moves forward
In January, the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) made a surprising announcement: It would change the computational heart of its premier forecast model, which divides the atmosphere into virtual parcels and solves the physical equations that describe how heat and moisture move around the globe. NWS had always relied on “dynamical cores” developed at its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But now, it would turn to a core developed at its longtime peer—and sometimes rival—the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the famed weather and climate research lab in Boulder, Colorado.
The news came with no small amount of irony. Just when NCAR was gaining validation and support from one part of the government, another was taking steps to dismantle it. A month earlier, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), had said the White House would “break up” NCAR, citing its role in “climate alarmism.”
The National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds NCAR, quickly followed OMB’s directive, soliciting bids to take over management of NCAR’s various components from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a nonprofit consortium of more than 100 universities. NSF has received a flood of responses, many of them simple protests from scientists. But serious ideas are on the table. The University of Wyoming (UW), at NSF’s request, will propose taking over an NCAR supercomputing center in Cheyenne. NSF is expected to move two NCAR-operated research aircraft to either NASA or NOAA. And this week, proposals are due to NSF for reconfiguring or dispersing the heart of NCAR—Boulder’s Mesa Lab, the striking building that is home to most of its 800 scientists and engineers. For decades they have researched how storms form, how seasonal weather can be predicted, and how the world will change with the warmer temperatures to come.
https://www.science.org/content/article/white-house-plan-break-iconic-u-s-climate-lab-moves-forward
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NSF officials break silence on how AI and quantum now drive agency grantmaking
Leaders acknowledge White House role in controversial moves
For the first time, officials at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) have spoken publicly about how President Donald Trump is now calling the shots at the $9 billion research agency, with his administration reorienting it to focus on the twin White House priorities of artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum information science.
The occasion was a presentation yesterday to the National Science Board (NSB), NSF’s presidentially appointed governing body, which meets three or four times a year. In an hourlong public briefing, acting NSF Director Brian Stone and Chief Management Officer Micah Cheatham, both nonscientists, explained how Trump’s goal of pumping up federal spending in those two areas has essentially shifted NSF away from its role as an independent agency that funds all fields outside clinical medicine using input from the research community into a vehicle for administration priorities.
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President Donald Trump’s administration will move the U.S. Forest Service headquarters out of the nation’s capital to Salt Lake City as part of an organizational overhaul that involves shuttering research facilities in 31 states and concentrating resources in the West, the agency announced Tuesday.
“The decentralization process in this guise is an attempt to destroy the capacity and effectiveness” of agencies like the Forest Service, said Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis and history at Pomona College.
Miller argued that, in order to carry out the functions the Forest Service is meant to do, a Washington office is needed “because that’s where Congress is, that makes the budgetary decisions that drive the mission of the organization and what it can do.”
Steve Ellis, a former deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service employee, said the Forest Service needs people in Washington to form relationships with counterparts in Congress and the Office of Management and Budget to ensure the agency gets the resources it needs.
The BLM move to Grand Junction, Colorado, also led to brain drain of experienced staff leaving the agency who didn’t want their children to change schools or their spouses to leave their jobs in Washington, Ellis said.
“If you want to downsize the federal government and get federal employees to leave, that is one way to do it,” he said.
“You’re losing a lot of seasoned talent, a lot of institutional knowledge when you do that.”
President Donald Trump had similarly moved the Bureau of Land Management headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado in his first term, leading to 90 percent of the staff to leaving the agency.
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Another update on the insanity of this. S24 was accepted for 2 total REUs this cycle. The one he is accepting had over 300 applications for 8 spots. An article about this in 2023 said the same program had 100 applicants. One he was not accepted to had over 600 applicants for 20 spots. He is exceptionally lucky that he has a spot anywhere this summer, esp in a field he is truly interested in.
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Is the future for science majors looking any better outside the US at this time? My D26 is comparing offers from universities in the US and Canada, and is wondering whether Canada would be any better?
What field?
Many governments are establishing special funding programs to attract US educated scientists to their countries.
In order to fund new military spending, the Administration’s funding for several agencies will be further reduced:
- A 19% decrease to the Department of Agriculture, ending certain university grants.
- A 13% decrease to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds low-income housing.
- A 12% decrease to the Department of Health and Human Services, including cuts to a low-income heating assistance program.
- A $106 million cut in funding for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
- Eliminating more than $15 billion in funding from the Biden-era bipartisan infrastructure
- Cuts to National Oceans and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) grant programs.
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Bachelors in biomedical engineering (although she might end up doing something adjacent to that, either more on the biology side or more on the engineering side). So for her specifically, the question is currently about biomedical research… but my question is really more general, because I’m sure she is not the only science student wondering if the grass is greener in Canada?
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I have wondered the same thing. I do not think that I have any answers however.
Many, many years ago jobs in high tech were way easier to come by in the USA. I was under the impression that this is still true. However, many of the best known US high tech companies have facilities in India and some also have facilities in Canada. I know of a small number of software engineers (very small) who were from India, whose temporary visa to work in the US expired and could not be renewed, so they went to Canada. I am pretty sure that their employer gave them the choice of Canada or India (most likely Bangalore). Most went back to India but a few did go to Canada instead. Of course denying their visa extension in the US did not create a job for an American, it just caused the same person holding the same job to do it somewhere else. When you spend your day on a computer screen you can do this anywhere that the Internet reaches. The few cases I am thinking of occurred before the current presidential administration started so this is not just a recent issue.
My daughter who is working towards a PhD at a very good private university in the US seems to have funding for now. The same program did accept fewer students a year ago and probably will continue to accept fewer students in the application round that is going on now. There is a bit of funding from the Canadian government to support research done by Canadian citizens who have a bachelor’s degree from a Canadian university but who are pursuing a PhD in the US. I do not know how this is going however and am not sure how much funding is involved or now hard it is to get. Of course some of the best known Canadian universities have tried to lure some strong students from the US, but again I do not know how many positions are involved.
I am hoping and still expecting that the current dearth of research funding in the USA is only a short term issue that will go away in three years.
To me there seems to be a lot of uncertainty here.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/business/dealbook/trump-brain-drain-academia.html
A study in September by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank, warned that without a reversal, the cuts to science could shrink the U.S. economy by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years. That could leave the U.S. lagging behind China, which is investing heavily in research.
And last month, the Partnership for Public Service, another nonpartisan organization in Washington, estimated that 95,000 employees had departed federal science agencies from September 2024 to December 2025. The report said budget cuts were “jeopardizing our nation’s research and development pipeline.” Trump’s proposed budget for 2027 includes new funding cuts for scientific research.
But to the rest of the world, the Trump administration’s cuts to science seem like an unbidden gift. And several are making sizable investments to attract American talent.
Canada’s industry minister, Mélanie Joly, told DealBook last year, describing the government’s plans to draw top U.S. scientists; it unveiled its $1.2 billion, 12-year program in December. “We want the best and the brightest,” she said.
Similarly, China last year fast-tracked relocation for scientists who had lost funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, where the Trump administration canceled or froze 5,844 research grants last year, according to data analyzed by the journal Nature. And in May, the European Union launched a 500-million-euro Choose Europe for Science program, prompting numerous institutions across the 27 E.U. countries to add further programs of their own.
Austrian Academy of Science last year introduced €500,000 four-year fellowships for 25 American scientists.
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