A Princeton Ph.D. Sent Out 2,300 Applications and Still Has No Job
A Princeton PhD Applied to 2,300 Jobs. He Still Can't Get One
Jack Weis earned a chemical engineering Ph.D. from Princeton in 2024 and has been job hunting ever since, living in his parents' basement in Salt Lake City. He chased corporate science roles and national-lab postdocs, then widened his search to software engineering, and eventually got ghosted even by food-prep jobs at a frozen crab cake company. A stint training AI on his fluid mechanics expertise dried up too — a portrait of a labor market deep freeze hitting educated workers hardest.
Eventually, he was getting ghosted for food-preparation jobs, including at a company that sells frozen crab cakes.