--- title: "Princeton PhD Jack Weis says 2,300 job applications in two years have not landed him a job" url: https://badiyaa.com/princeton-phd-jack-weis-2300-job-applications/ published: 2026-10-21T11:00:00+01:00 modified: 2026-10-21T11:55:07+01:00 section: Offbeat publisher: Badiyaa --- # Princeton PhD Jack Weis says 2,300 job applications in two years have not landed him a job The 30-year-old chemical engineer co-wrote a 2022 ice-formation paper, briefly trained AI at $70 an hour, and is now studying for the law school admission test. Jack Weis has a doctorate in chemical engineering from Princeton, his name on a 2022 paper about how ice forms, and, by his own count, more than 2,300 job applications sent since he finished the degree in 2024. None has turned into a job. The 30-year-old from Salt Lake City described the search in an interview published over the weekend, and his story has been shared widely online this week. One thing is missing from the viral version: a post by Weis himself. Badiyaa searched for a public LinkedIn or X post in which he sets out the 2,300 figure and found none. The numbers trace back to that single interview, where he and his parents spoke on the record, so they are his own account rather than a count anyone else has checked. ## From national labs to frozen crab cakes According to that interview, Weis began where a new chemical engineering doctor usually would: research jobs at drug companies and competitive postdoctoral fellowships at US national laboratories. When those went nowhere, he broadened the hunt to software engineering roles and to openings in any region or industry. Most applications did not produce an interview. In the end he was not hearing back on food-preparation work, including at a company that sells frozen crab cakes. He did find one paid gig. In January 2026 he started part-time work at $70 an hour for a startup that hired subject experts to train artificial intelligence systems. The hours swung from about 20 in some weeks to four in others, and in March he learned in a group chat message that his contract was over. He now lives in his parents’ basement. His mother summed up the family’s confusion in two short lines: *“It’s quite surprising,”* and *“I don’t know how to put it together.”* ## What the Nobel connection actually is The “Nobel-cited” tag in the headlines needs unpacking. Weis is the second of five authors on [“Homogeneous ice nucleation in an ab initio machine-learning model of water”](https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC9388152), published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August 2022. The team, all at Princeton, used a machine-learning model trained on quantum-level calculations to estimate how fast ice crystals appear in supercooled water, and found rates that broadly matched lab measurements. The paper has since been cited 64 times, according to the European Bioinformatics Institute’s literature index. Accounts of his interview say the Nobel committee pointed to this ice research as an example of machine learning used in science when it announced the 2024 physics prize. Badiyaa could not open the committee’s background document to check the exact reference, so that detail rests on his account. ## The numbers behind 2,300 applications Spread over roughly two years, 2,300 applications works out to about 22 a week, or a little over three every day, weekends included (2,300 divided by 104 weeks is 22.1; divided by 730 days it is 3.2). The official figures help explain why his story struck a nerve, and also why it is unusual: - The US jobless rate was 4.2 percent in September 2026, with 7.1 million people out of work, according to the [Bureau of Labor Statistics](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm). - About 1.9 million of them had been looking for 27 weeks or more. That is 27.1 percent, or roughly one unemployed person in four. - Employers added just 29,000 jobs in September, against an average of 45,000 a month over the previous year. - For people 25 and older with at least a bachelor’s degree, the seasonally adjusted rate was 2.5 percent, compared with 4.4 percent for high school graduates who never went to college, per [BLS table A-4](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm). Put together, degree holders as a group are still less likely to be jobless, yet a slow-hiring market leaves the people who are out of work stuck for longer. Weis sits in that smaller, long-term group, with a résumé that would normally keep someone out of it. Online, many readers have pointed out that a single case says little about the market as a whole, and that his CV has not been made public. ## What he is doing now Weis is studying for the law school admission test, which he plans to sit in November, and is trying to build a business around an AI-designed drone meant to kill invasive weeds. *“If I truly believe I have some value, I should go out and get it,”* he said. The next national jobs report, covering October, is due from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday, November 6, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. ## Further reading - [Europe PMC: Homogeneous ice nucleation in an ab initio machine-learning model of water (PNAS, 2022)](https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC9388152) - [US Bureau of Labor Statistics: The Employment Situation, September 2026](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm) - [BLS Table A-4: Employment status by educational attainment](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm) *Image: Smallbones, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*