Over the course of the last year, Dartmouth College senior Evan McMahon applied to between 200 and 300 jobs, mostly in the public health field.

McMahon, an economics major and public health minor set to graduate this weekend, is interested in finance and health systems in the developing world.

“The entire ecosystem of global health and nonprofits was completely shifted by the Trump administration,” he said in a phone interview.

On three occasions, McMahon saw global health consulting positions he had applied for get “completely canceled” due to funding cuts, he said. “They would reply saying, ‘We don’t have the ability to hire anymore’.”

“We worked really hard at this elite institution; it feels like it should be a little easier to get a job,” McMahon said.

McMahon is one of many students graduating from Dartmouth this year who struggled to firm up post-graduation plans or who feel shaky about the plan they do have in the face of uncertainty.

After a year of searching, Bishal Dev Sharma, who recently completed his doctorate at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, is finally close to landing a job.

“For someone who is fresher, it seems like the market is very bad,” Sharma said in a phone interview. “It’s hard to even get an interview.”

Sharma, who is from Nepal, ideally wanted to find an employer who would sponsor him in getting a visa, making the hunt even more difficult.

“Once I mention I might need a visa sponsorship, that’s a dead end,” Sharma said.

While Sharma attributes his troubles to the market being “oversaturated with qualified people” and not the political landscape, international students have been a target of the Trump administration.

In April, more than 1,200 international students and recent graduates had their visas revoked, one of whom was at Dartmouth. Many have since had their visas reinstated, but last month the administration said it would be “aggressively” revoking visas from Chinese students with connections to China’s ruling Communist Party or who were studying in fields deemed critical.

If he can’t secure a new visa in the next three years, Sharma will have to return home, where there are even fewer job opportunities, and “access to all your basic needs” is not as easy as it is in the United States, he said.

Early on in the school year, Rhea Karty, a computer science and economics major, landed a research position at Harvard doing formal code verification.

“When I was applying in winter, it was a different landscape,” Karty said. “If I was trying to find this position now, I wouldn’t be able to find it.”

In April, President Donald Trump canceled more than $2.2 billion in federal research grants for Harvard when the institution refused to comply with the Trump administration’s demands to limit activism on campus.

While Karty’s job is safe for now, she’s “building up backup options” by looking at positions at other institutions and in the private sector.

The challenges faced by Dartmouth graduates mirror broader national trends.

Handshake, one of the leading career platforms for college students, reported in April that the average member of the class of 2025 submitted 21% more job applications on the platform than the average class of 2024 student.

On average, jobs received 30% more applications this year than last year.

“Aside from the technology sector, which has experienced several years of decline in applications, jobs in federal, state and local government lost a greater share of applications than any other industry. This is a reversal of last year’s trend when government jobs had an uptick of applications, Handshake reported.

“We saw less opportunities with the state of New Hampshire in general,” Jennifer Tockman, the director of career services at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, said.

Tockman attributed the decrease in open positions to the uncertainty of the flow of federal dollars.

“Graduate school admissions have been atrocious because funding got cut for so many groups,” Dartmouth senior Brady Quintard said.

Since February, the Trump administration has used multiple tactics to try to block institutions from receiving billions of dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health.

In response to the uncertainty, universities across the country have cut back on admission offers for graduate students and, in some cases, implemented hiring freezes.

Regardless of the economic and political climate, some soon-to-be graduates have yet to attempt to find a job or gain acceptance to graduate school.

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