An Open Letter to Graduating PhDs in a Post-Federal Science World
July 15, 2025
Dear New PhDs,
Stop me if you've heard this one: "We're interested in hosting you as a postdoc, but you'd have to bring your own funding."
Or maybe it's the folks suggesting your analytical skills are being superseded by AI.
Perhaps it's both—a perfect storm where funding has dried up just as AI threatens to reshape the scientific landscape.
If you're graduating into this reality, you're facing a different landscape than the one I did a decade ago.
First: this absolutely sucks.
Many of you started your PhD just before or during the COVID pandemic. Lab shutdowns. Remote work. Disrupted research. Now as you complete your degrees, you're facing an unprecedented funding future. You've been screwed on the way in and on the way out.
As a PI who sees your talent, your dedication, and your potential, I get the unfairness of this. You've done everything right. The system is failing you, not the other way around.
I'm sure you feel unseen right now. Like your years of work don't matter. Like the expertise you've built has no place. But we do see you! Your mentors, the faculty, the researchers—we see your capability and your contribution. This institutional failure doesn't diminish what you've accomplished or what you're capable of!
The emotional toll is real. It's not just about money (though money matters). It's about watching a dream career crumble. It’s about feeling like the future you trained for vanished. It’s about wondering if you wasted years of your life. These feelings are valid. Make no mistake: this is grief. For the career path that was supposed to be, for the predictability you thought you'd have, for the sense that hard work would be rewarded.
What now? A few practical thoughts from someone still figuring it out alongside you.
This moment is training
This moment isn't something to just survive. It's training in the qualities that will define the next generation of scientific leaders.
You're being forced to develop resourcefulness. Creativity. Resilience under pressure. While your predecessors learned to navigate established systems with relatively ample funding, you're learning to build new ones.
Every constraint you're working within—limited funding, uncertain career paths, rapidly changing technology—is teaching you. As you emerge from this, you will be uniquely equipped to thrive in uncertainty. To build value from limited resources. To find innovative solutions.
This isn't a consolation prize. This is recognizing that adversity, when met with intention, becomes the thing that prepares you for unknown future challenges.
Focus on what's within your control
When systems collapse, the natural response is panic or paralysis. Resist both.
Your ability to think systematically, solve complex problems, and learn rapidly remain valuable regardless of funding structures.
What you can control is your skills pipeline. Keep building capabilities that transcend funding models. Your network matters now more than ever! Connect with folks whose work you admire, not just those with funding. Work on your adaptability threshold by practicing getting comfortable with uncertainty. Maintain your daily work habits.
Stay focused on the present. Energy spent dwelling on the broken system, COVID disruptions, and the unfairness of it all drains you. Worrying about future scenarios creates anxiety that undermines your ability to act effectively now. You only ever have 'now' to make progress, ask good questions, or build something. Guard that focus carefully.
What you can't control: Federal mandates. Congressional appropriations committees. University administrative decisions. Whether funders decide basic research matters again. The opinions of people who think you should "get a real job."
Put your energy exclusively in the first category.
Don't try to game the system
I've watched colleagues transform into professional grant-chasers, becoming more skilled at working funding angles than conducting actual research. They've built careers around predicting what buzzwords program officers want to hear. With federal funding diminishing, and with a completely reworked set of research priorities, those specialized gaming skills are depreciating assets. The next system will have different rules, different gatekeepers, different priorities.
Instead, build your reputation on substance. Do good work that matters to you and can be explained to others. The format and funding will change. The value of your genuine contribution won't. Whether your research is funded through federal grants, industry partnerships, or models that don't yet exist, the quality of your thinking and your approach will always matter.
Don't go dormant
Equally dangerous is the "wait and see" approach. There might be a tendency to freeze in place, thinking the odds are too long. I'm guilty of this myself! I tell our lab group to keep moving forward and do good work, because it matters now mroe than ever. Unlike dormancy in microbes, hibernation is rarely a successful professional strategy.
Remaining scientifically alive means continuing to ask questions that matter. It means designing ways to answer them, even with limited resources. It means sharing what you learn through whatever channels remain, and engaging with others' ideas. Find ways to stay engaged, even if it looks different than you imagined.
Creativity will be your most valuable research tool. Look for problems that can be tackled with ingenuity rather than resources. Collaborate to share costs and expertise. Make use of open-source tools, citizen science, and creative partnerships with industry or community organizations. Some of the best scientific insights have come from folks working with constraints.
Expand your vision
Scientists are increasingly exploring areas that don't feel central to their scientific identity at first. Intellectual property law. Project management. Business development. Data visualization. These adjacent skills expand what you can recognize as opportunity and create new pathways for applying your scientific training.
Consider exploring management and leadership. Leading teams effectively is rare, yet always valuable. Business fundamentals matter—learning how resources flow and decisions get made isn't "giving up." Communication across disciplines creates value when you can be the translator between technical and non-technical worlds. Data science and visualization skills will only become more essential as we make meaning from complexity. Understanding regulatory and policy landscapes provides both insight and opportunity.
The goal isn't to abandon science but to create more surface area for work to stick to.
Find a job
Let's be honest: none of this advice pays rent. You need income. You need health insurance. You need to eat. The financial pressure is real and immediate.
So find a job doing something. Anything that uses your analytical skills while you figure out the next move.
Don't view that job as giving up. Every experience builds capability for what comes next. And it may open doors that you didn’t know existed.
That consulting role teaching you how businesses make decisions? You're learning how organizations function. The data science position showing you how to communicate complex information to non-experts? You're developing translation skills that will serve you everywhere. The regulatory job revealing how policy gets made? You're understanding the system that shapes research priorities. Even the completely unrelated work that pays the bills while you volunteer on research projects nights and weekends? You're building resilience and time management skills.
Your PhD didn't expire the moment you couldn't find a postdoctoral position. It's portable. It's valuable. And sometimes the most interesting scientific careers are built by people who took detours through other worlds first.
The goal is to recognize that each experience—if approached with intention—expands what you're capable of doing next.
Consider strategic education (maybe)
More education isn't automatically the answer. However, targeted learning can create leverage. A colleague recently completed a one-year master's in GIS technology that transformed her understanding of how to communicate science with maps.
Ask yourself: Does this additional education create new capabilities or just delay decisions? Can you learn this through means other than formal education? What's the actual return, not in dollars, but in options created? Will this help you create value regardless of funding models?
No one knows what happens next
The most honest thing I can tell you: no one—not a mid-career faculty like myself, not industry leaders, not policy experts—truly knows what the hell is going on or how science will reorganize with reduced federal funding. We're all thinking on our feet. Those of us in PI positions see your struggle and wish we had clearer answers or more secure pathways to offer you.
This uncertainty is frightening. But it's also where possibility lives.
Without established pathways, you're free (and now required) to create your own. Each generation of scientists has faced what felt like existential challenges. Scientific funding has evolved—from individual patronage to systematic government support to today's diversified landscape, which is now giving way to something else entirely. Science has survived religious control, wars, economic collapse, and radical technological shifts. This current crisis will eventually seem like just another transition point in the long arc of human knowledge.
What matters is that you keep asking important questions. Find ways to pursue them. The "how" will remain fluid, but the "why" is in your hands.
The researchers who emerge from this period will be the architects of whatever comes next. Your generation is being forced to reimagine how scientific knowledge gets created, funded, and shared.
That's not just adaptation. That's leadership.
With solidarity and hope,
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