I have two sons who are three years into PhD programs in science - one energy related and one in genetics. Thankfully they are doing well and don’t get discouraged easily, but one did mention recently that AI projects seemed to be the ones that attract funding. 2022-23 when they applied seems like the before times.
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My D28 wants to major in genetics. I worry about how this will unfold or if things will change during her freshman year as a new administration and priorities change. Glad that at least for now your sons are getting through.
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Probably best they don’t… 
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So much for autocorrect! Lol
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My daughter works in genetics. Her job is half counseling, half research. Let me know if you have any questions.
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Yes- she recently attended a grad school workshop where AI was heavily referenced…..
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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/27/world/canada/canada-universities-hire-us-researchers.html
Canada Hires 48 Scholars Away From Top U.S. Universities
Their hiring is paid for through a Canadian government investment of more than 500 million Canadian dollars (about $364 million) in research fields that are strategically important, from global warming to artificial intelligence. The program was announced last December as part of a broader $1.2 billion investment in Canadian innovation projects, with a second round of 63 academics to be hired next year.
Scientists were hired away from MIT, Yale, Harvard, University of Michigan, the NIH, University of Massachusetts, and others.
Those moving to Canadian universities include:
Phillip Zamore, the chair of RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts.
Kevin Hall, a nutrition scientist who left the U.S. National Institutes of Health last year, accusing federal officials of censoring his research on ultraprocessed foods, has been hired at the University of Ottawa.
Seth Guikema, a professor in civil and environmental engineering, who has specialized in natural hazards modeling at the University of Michigan.
Sara Seager, an astrophysicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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I’m very happy to know that science research is being funded somewhere!
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Some bad news averted.
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His research on ice formation was cited by the Nobel Committee when it announced the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics as an example of the scientific application of machine learning.
Weiss initially sent out a flood of applications targeting research positions at pharmaceutical companies and prestigious postdoctoral fellowships at national laboratories, but most went unanswered — with only the occasional rejection notice arriving in return.
He broadened his search across industries and regions, yet frequently could not even secure an interview. He eventually applied for a food preparation role at a company that sells frozen crab cakes, and never heard back at all.
Hoping his alumni network might help, he reached out by phone to graduates of both Princeton and Rice, but ultimately got little more than advice to check the companies’ job postings online.
In January this year, he took a part-time gig at a startup that trains AI professionals, earning $70 an hour.
At first his hours varied — sometimes 20 a week, sometimes as few as four — but idle days grew more frequent, stretching into weeks with no work at all. In mid-March, he learned his contract had been terminated through a group chat message.
This story was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, but it’s behind a paywall.
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It seems unbelievable and a waste worthy of despair.
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The person’s advisor and department failed them. My wife’s students and the students on whose PhD committee she sits are getting jobs or postdocs before they graduate, and they are not doing their PhDs at a college that has the name recognition that Princeton does. There were a few who graduated this year, so they are not graduating in a great job market for STEM.
The difference is that my wife’s students are applying and doing internships within their first few years, are training for job applications and interviews in industry, non-profits, and academia, and are going through intense mentorship. This person seems to have been mentored by wolves, and both his resume and the description of his job search indicates that this is the case.
First, the description of mass applications (2,300!!), meaning that he probably did not focus on building applications that were tailored for the specific jobs. Most jobs that require a PhD also require a well written application letter and an application that matches the industry standards. An Academic CV will get an application to an industry job ignored, and a resume for an industry job will not be seriously considered for an academic job.
I am skeptical about the quality of these applications, especially for the postdocs. There is simply no way that he could have produced that many applications that are focused on the actual job descriptions.
Then there is “reaching out to his alumni network”. That is useless for jobs that require a PhD. If the person has a PhD, they should have an existing network of colleagues and collaborators across the field. People that they met at conferences and followed up with, people that they discussed research with, people that they collaborated with on research.
His biggest issue, and likely the reason that most companies aren’t interested in him is that fact that, according to his LinkedIn page, he hasn’t done a single internship, hasn’t done any outside training. He is not competitive compared to a person with a PhD from, say, U Wisconsin, who has done two or three (or even one) internship during their PhD.
As for the postdocs? They write that he applied for “prestigious postdocs”, but not whether he applied for postdocs which weren’t so prestigious.
He is not competitive for "prestigious postdocs. He has, according to Google Scholar, only two publications, and only one of them is he first author. It is expected that a students who graduated with a PhD would have at least three publications, if not when they graduate, then soon after.
He is competing for these postdocs with PhDs who have 5,6, or double-digit publication lists. One of my wife’s recent graduates graduated this last summer, with 6 journal articles and 15 conference articles (in CS they are considered at the same level as journal articles). Another one of my wife’s recent graduates has fewer publications (4 journal and 8 conference), but has been cited thousands of times (more than 5,000). Each has done internships, research projects at other universities and research institutions, not to mention multiple awards.
The person in this article is not even close to being competitive for “prestigious postdocs” when competing with students like my wife’s students, despite having done his PhD at Princeton and being associated with a Nobel Prize.
He may be competitive for postdocs that are not prestigious - the ones that are being hired to support large research projects, but he is a weak applicant even for those. Still, a good applications and networking with PIs can get you one of those, but he seems to not have done either.
The bottom line is that he is not being hired because he has no industry experience, and his research record is limited. A PhD from Princeton doesn’t get you very far without either industry experience or research output, as well as a professional network and the ability to make a case for yourself on your job applications.
Instead of churning out thousands of applications, he should have been writing his articles and publishing them, and he should be looking for industry internships, not jobs.
Again, his advisors should have taught him this, and should have made certain that he was applying for internships, presenting and networking at conferences, and publishing his research. They didn’t, and it is a massive failure for his advisors, who are both Big Names in the field.
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Thank you for taking the time to write this. For those of us without a lot of experience in this field, your response provides context and an explanation for what otherwise appears to be an alarming anecdote.
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Over two years, that seems to be an average of 3.15 applications per day, or 4.42 per week day. Would an unemployed person have the time to do application tailoring at that rate? I.e. how much work is tailoring a job application for these types of jobs?
In addition I would add that normally advisors would be able to pull some strings for something for a worthy candidate - maybe not the most prestigious job, but something. The fact that they didn’t tells me something about this candidate - I don’t think it’s a failure on the part of the advisors, I suspect it’s a deliberate choice related to the candidate.
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As my genius brother used to say, being brilliant is useless unless you are able to figure out how to use your intellect to move yourself forward. He was not able to parlay brains into meaningful actions, so he knew what he was talking about.
An application for a regular postdoc would include researching the position, including reading publications that are related the research that one would be joining, etc. Prestigious postdocs often include independent research, meaning a research proposal, which is hours and hours of work.
All post-docs would require tailored letters of recommendation as well.
Furthermore, postdocs are generally announced in the fall, and need to be submitted within a couple of months. So one would need to be applying for all of them in a three month period. It is unlikely that he would have been able to produce more than 20 of these over that three month period, and these would be full time occupation.
As for industry jobs, those require at least as much effort as applying for colleges. Assuming that the person has a format and a CV, we’re talking about 2 hours per application. So with 3.15 applications per day, or 4.42 per week day, that means that a person is spending almost 10 hours per weekday or 6 hours per day churning out job applications.
Of course, if he is applying for jobs that do not require a PhD or a masters, he can churn out that many. However, he is almost certainly not going to be contacted by HR from companies like these. It is really not surprising that he didn’t hear back from that job in food prep.
That is another thing I didn’t add - there are not going to be 100 jobs a month for which a person with a PhD in any particular subfield of chemical engineering is qualified. There are unlikely to be more than 10 of those a month at very most, and it is likely that it will be far fewer. So it is most likely that the vast majority of jobs to which this person applied were not looking for a person with a PhD in any engineering PhD, much less a chemical engineering PhD. Which is why I wrote that he was wasting his time and energy on these, even if he was “only” wasting 2 hours a day of quality work time.
Good point. Advisors cannot actually help much in faculty hires (there are strong guardrails in place for that), or for the prestigious postdocs. However, an advisors personal recommendation does help a lot in the hiring of postdocs to help in a research project. There is often not much money allocated for hiring these postdocs in the grant proposals, so there is a certain level of informality in these.
With Big Name advisors, this should have helped him find a postdoc.
I will disagree with you somewhat, though. I think that having a graduate of your lab who you choose not to help get a postdoc is also a certain degree of failure.
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As noted in the other thread where this is being discussed (the 25-26 job thread), that poor kid’s story is ALL over the web. Typing in his name brings up dozens and dozens of links. That’s not gonna help him 
With a background like his there is likely something in his background that is a kick-out for employers. And gotta wonder what his recommendations say. When I was in grad school we had a classmate or 2 that, while they made it through the program, they would likely have a hard time with job placement.