My baws. I know the finding a job struggle is real. Too many here know just how painful it is. Came across the linked article below this am. Its WSJ and paywall but ill post the juicy buts out there.

The struggle is real and my heart goes out to all of you trying to navigate these mine fields.

A Princeton Ph. D Applied to 2,300 Jobs. He AStill can't get one.

JACK WEIS likes to joke that he’s just another unemployed guy living in his parents’ basement.

That leaves out a few key details: The Salt Lake City native has applied to more than 2,300 jobs since he graduated from Princeton in 2024 with his Ph.D. in chemical engineering. And he still doesn’t have a job.

He first pursued corporate science jobs and prestigious postdoctoral fellowships at national laboratories. Then he cast a wider net, applying to software engineering and other roles. Eventually, he was getting ghosted for food-preparation jobs, including at a company that sells frozen crab cakes.

For a time, Weis got a gig training AI on his expertise, including in engineering and fluid mechanics. That work dried up too.

I first interviewed Weis late last year, the day before his 30th birthday. Covering careers and the labor market, I endeavored to meet job seekers in all 50 states, hoping it would help me understand why many people felt so dim about their futures. Just 34% of Americans surveyed by Gallup in August said it was a good time to find a quality job.

The picture remains murky. The latest jobs report fell far short of expectations. The unemployment rate remains low, but the percentage of unemployed people out of work for 27 weeks or more was higher this summer than it’s been for more than a decade, with the exception of Covid-19 and its immediate aftermath.

He soon widened his search geographically, and by industry. He sent hundreds of cover letters and résumés through job portals and often didn’t get an interview. He networked with Princeton and Rice alumni. He scoured classified ads in the Salt Lake Tribune. He read PitchBook updates to find startups that recently got influxes of cash, thinking it might result in job openings.

His mother, Dr. Holly Carveth, said she looked at her son’s applications, wondering if there was a red flag that made employers hesitate, but nothing stood out. They seemed to be well written. “It’s quite surprising,” she said. “I don’t know how to put it together.”

As the months ticked by, Weis found himself stumbling on dates when the topic of work came up. At first, he said, he would tell the person across the table that he had recently finished his Ph.D. A year later, “it feels a little odd to say that,” he said.

Weis and many job candidates I interviewed described job interviews that happened without humans—the applicants made a video recording of themselves responding to questions posed digitally on the call. Such a process is increasingly common in the application process: More than 60% of U.S. job seekers surveyed by Greenhouse said they had been interviewed by the technology in the last year.

WEIS WAS THOUGHTFUL about the strange economic dichotomy many people in his position were experiencing. Since Weis defended his dissertation two years ago, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at record highs more than 50 times.

Staying in his childhood home, Weis has saved money and made some investments. He didn’t take on debt for his postgraduate degree—doctoral students are paid to do research rather than paying large sums in tuition.

“It’s cool that my stocks keep going up, I’m not mad about that,” he said earlier this year. “But it does make it a whole lot stranger.”

His parents compare notes with others whose adult children are struggling to find work. They remain shocked by the situation, and worry about their son’s ability to put down roots and one day have a family.

“We never dreamed he would have issues. He’s an Eagle Scout, he helps others, he’s environmentally conscious, he’s physically fit,” his father, Dr. John Weis, told me. “He’s smarter than I am, he’s more articulate than I am. He’s got an encyclopedic knowledge of history.”

Weis wonders if he should go to law school. He signed up for the LSAT in November. He has gotten involved in the Utah GOP and has sent petitions for rule making to federal agencies, including one urging the decoupling of employment and health insurance. (If fewer people stay in jobs for insurance, he reasons, there could be more openings.) He is also trying his hand at entrepreneurship. He used AI to design a drone with LED lasers to kill myrtle spurge, an invasive weed. “If I truly believe I have some value, I should go out and get it,” he says.

He still applies to new fellowships as they come up. In October, he unlocked his job-application account at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and realized that a role he applied for in 2024 had finally been filled.

For two years, the status had remained static: “Review in progress.”