Chemistry majors, set to graduate in May, stress over their futures

She was excited when the acceptance letter came in January, from a research university in a major East Coast city. “In my brain, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is it,’ ” the student tells C&EN.

But in February, when she put together all the offers she had, she began to feel nervous. The offer letter from the research university that was her first choice had promised a contract to follow, but it hadn’t yet arrived. Meanwhile, rejections from some other universities mentioned uncertainty about federal funding—a topic that had also been making headlines in both science-focused and mainstream news outlets. The student, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she’s concerned about jeopardizing her admission, wrote to the admissions office at her first-choice school to ask for an update.

In an email in mid-February, an admissions officer said they were “uncertain whether the recommendation from the chemistry department for your admission to the PhD program will result in an offer from the Graduate School.” Despite having initially received an offer, the student was subsequently put on the waitlist. But, the admissions officer wrote, she was still welcome to attend a visitation weekend for admitted students.

She went, but her visit didn’t clarify her future. One professor assured her, “If you’re here, that means we have funding for you for the next 4 or 5 years,” while others said that they couldn’t predict whether she would see a firm offer because of questions about the program’s funding.

“Everything and everyone is really unsure of what’s going to happen,” the student says. “That’s creating a lot of anxiety for me and all the applicants in this cycle.”

Cuts to federal research funding, threats to indirect costs that support research, and revocation of previously awarded grants from the US National Science Foundation and US National Institutes of Health in the first weeks of President Donald J. Trump’s second administration have roiled academia. They have also thrown the typically competitive and regimented graduate admissions process into chaos. Now students, professors, and administrators are trying to make career-altering decisions with no guarantee of continuity.

“I think the effect on undergrads is probably not yet realized,” says Brian Coppola, a chemistry professor at the University of Michigan. He thinks a lot of students may be heading into an unplanned gap year—and he and other professors worry many will leave science altogether.

C&EN spoke with eight students waiting for decisions on their applications to graduate school and nine professors who work with undergraduates or run doctoral programs. Their experiences show how uncertainty is eroding prospects for young people who had hoped to pursue careers in chemistry.

A narrowing pathway into academia

Keana Redfearn, an undergraduate biochemistry student in her fourth year at the University of California, Los Angeles, applied to five PhD programs. Three have since notified her that reductions to the size of their incoming classes might affect her; one rejected her after putting her on its waitlist, citing uncertainty about funding. She posted a video about the emails on the social media platform TikTok and then added a follow-up video explaining how disruptive these changes have been to her education and career plans: “When I applied to PhDs in proteomics, I knew that it was a very saturated field. I knew it was a very difficult field to get into. But I did not expect [universities] to fully stop accepting any students and rescinding acceptances because of the funding issues,” she says in the video.

Redfearn tells C&EN that the original video, which has garnered around 1 million views since Feb. 23, has received a mix of reactions. Some viewers have commiserated, but many outside of her field seem to doubt she is telling the truth. “A lot of people were telling me, ‘If this was really happening, I would see it everywhere,’ ” Redfearn says.

According to the US National Center for Education Statistics, more than 39,000 people received bachelor’s or master’s degrees in chemistry and related scientific fields in the US in the 2021–22 academic year, the latest year for which data are available. This year, many graduate programs in chemistry have cut their admissions offers dramatically.

A chemistry professor at a major East Coast research university that has reduced its incoming class size by half says that she can’t blame administrators for the decision.

“Everyone understands that the priority is to protect existing students and be able to fund them,” says the professor, who insisted on anonymity for fear of professional repercussions. “Given the uncertainty of the situation from [the] federal government, this is inevitable.”

Riley Sullivan is a senior at Indiana University of Pennsylvania who hopes to earn a PhD in chemistry. He heard from several chemistry programs that they had seen record numbers of applications.

When he presented his work at the analytical chemistry conference Pittcon in early March, Sullivan was feeling confident. He had been admitted to both Iowa State University and the University of Connecticut (UConn) and had until April 15 to decide between them.

“I think that right now the field of chemistry is much safer than other fields,” he told C&EN in a message soon after the conference. “I am confident that as long as I do well in graduate school, I’ll be able to land a good-paying job.”

But the following weekend, his admission offer to Iowa State was rescinded. In an email to C&EN, an Iowa State spokesperson writes, “Based on unprecedented acceptance rates and uncertainties with funding, some departments have made the prudent yet difficult decision to rescind offers to some graduate students who had not yet accepted their offer of admission.”

Sullivan says the letter mentioned that the department would have been unable to pay him a stipend. “I was quite upset at first,” he writes, “but I calmed down once I processed that even if I had went there that they might have not been able to pay me.” He now plans to enroll at UConn.

Physicist Keivan Stassun of Vanderbilt University says that Sullivan’s experience is becoming common. “Students who were told they were about to be admitted into a doctoral program . . . are seeing their admissions rescinded and throwing the entire possibility of pursuing advanced study into doubt,” Stassun says. Not one student graduating from his or his colleagues’ labs with master’s or bachelor’s of science degrees this year has received an offer of admission to a PhD program that has lasted.

On March 12, the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School surprised PhD applicants, including several dozen who had accepted offers of admission, by rescinding all of its offers. “With uncertainties related to the funding of biomedical research in this country, this difficult decision was made to ensure that our current students’ progress is not disrupted by the funding cuts and that we avoid matriculating students who may not have robust opportunities for dissertation research,” a spokesperson for the university tells C&EN in an email.

Zemen Sarah Berhe, a chemistry instructor at Simmons University, points out that academia was a decidedly unstable career path before federal funding issues threw off universities’ hiring and admissions plans. Academics have to go where the jobs are, sometimes uprooting themselves to move thousands of miles from family and friends in pursuit of tenure-track positions. More and more, she’s seen students and colleagues opt for other career paths, like science communication, consulting, policy analysis, and entrepreneurship, and she thinks the uncertainty of the past few weeks could push more would-be chemists away from research.

“It’s a very, I would say, challenging time,” Berhe says. “It’s really unfortunate, because science needs money. I think it will take the United States I’m not sure how many decades back.”

Some would-be academics are now considering careers in private industry instead. Sophia Brooks, a chemistry major set to graduate this year from Howard University, had hoped to join a postbaccalaureate research program after finishing her degree this spring and then apply to graduate school in a year or two. But the program she applied to at the US National Institutes of Health has been canceled, and other programs’ futures look precarious. Instead, she has begun to apply for jobs in industry, which she sees as more stable than academia.

“Since I don’t have a master’s or a PhD, it would be difficult for me to get anything higher than entry level,” she says. And in certain regions, new graduates may face competition from more-senior scientists who until recently were employed as federal workers or government contractors.

As a first-generation college graduate, she also feels at a disadvantage compared with peers who have family connections in science. She says she’s not sure whether she’ll try to return to graduate school. It all depends on whether the sector feels as unstable in a few years.

Precarity for international students

When Iowa State University revoked an international student’s admission to its chemistry program, it “shattered” the aspiring chemist’s plans, the student tells C&EN. The student insisted on anonymity to avoid affecting any outstanding admission decisions. As an international student, they had already started making arrangements to move to the US. Meanwhile, another school they had applied to temporarily froze its admissions process for budget-related reasons. A representative from the school told the student they would have been accepted otherwise.

Another international student, who is currently completing a master’s program in chemistry in Texas and who requested anonymity for fear of compromising his applications, tells C&EN that he wants to pursue a PhD in materials science but has not heard back after interviewing. If he doesn’t secure a position this year, he plans to return home and apply again later. Studying in another country would be a second choice, he says.

A facility and equipment manager in the chemistry department at a large Midwestern university says he feels increasingly “weird” speaking with international students, who may have an especially difficult time finding postgraduate work in the US given the Trump administration’s hostility toward immigration. “I’m accustomed to foreign students and postdocs looking forward to careers in the United States,” he says. Now he hears more international scholars say they’re planning to return home.

“What do I say to the British postdoc I’m used to kind of chatting with in the morning?” asks the manager, who spoke to C&EN on the condition of anonymity because he fears professional repercussions. “These are people who are dedicating their life to science,” he says. “We want to do our research . . . and we don’t want to have to think about politics.”

Meanwhile, students from the US like Redfearn, the UCLA senior, are weighing their options for continuing their careers abroad. But differences between the educational systems make it difficult to go straight from a bachelor’s degree in the US into a foreign doctoral program, and Redfearn says she would have to pay tuition—potentially out of pocket. “It’s pretty unrealistic,” she says of the international fallback plan.

Even if emigration were easy, it would not be an option for everyone. In 2021, the US boasted 3.2 million graduate students in all fields, dwarfing most other countries except for China, which counted 3.65 million in 2022. Absent a colossal international scale-up in training, academia simply does not have enough places for all the students to go.

‘Keep pushing through’

The student who was waitlisted at the East Coast research university after being accepted had been told, in January, that she had until March 15 to accept the offer. But on March 13, she told C&EN that the school had informed her the deadline no longer applied.

“All admissions offers for me and my peers are in limbo,” she said. Offers from other programs, which she had hoped she could fall back on, are similarly up in the air. She is uncertain and sad—especially after having weathered the COVID-19 pandemic as a high school student 5 years ago.

“I didn’t get a prom; I didn’t get my high school graduation; my freshman year of college was fully online,” the student says. “It feels really cruel that these next 4 years, we’re kind of going through a situation that’s limiting us.”

Patrick Lutz, a chemistry professor at Saint Lawrence University, says he doubts that students who are not accepted for PhD programs this year will reapply. “For a lot of students, I think if they aren’t able to get into grad school or some similar position right away, there’s a good chance that they’re not going to return,” he says.

Redfearn says even if she reapplies next year, she feels dubious about her chances. Even assuming a return to normal funding levels, “it’ll be one of the most competitive cycles in history,” because a new crop of graduates will join a glut of students who had hoped to start graduate school this year but were stymied.

Redfearn raised this concern with her professor mentors. “I was asking them . . . ‘Should I give up now and just go start a business somewhere and do something completely different?’ They kept telling me, ‘No, funding has always been a big issue,’ ” Redfearn says. “ ‘So keep pushing through, keep sending in those applications and keep trying.’ ”