HANOVER — 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’.”

After broadening his search, McMahon eventually accepted a position in public relations for Global Health Strategies, an international consulting firm. The Chicago native will be starting his position in the firm’s New York City office later this summer.

Although McMahon is “not necessarily wanting to pursue public relations,” he’s happy to be done with the search and “really excited” to have a job in proximity to the field of global health.

“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 economic and political 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.

As of Thursday, Sharma was “very close” to signing an offer with a biotech company in California, but the position doesn’t currently come with a visa sponsorship. He hopes that either circumstances change and his employer agrees to sponsor him, or he can self-petition for a visa granted to immigrants with “extraordinary ability.”

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, including the Dartmouth student, 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.

Under his current visa, Sharma has three years to work before needing employer-sponsored authorization, so he does have “some time to navigate next steps,” he said.

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.

“That’s a risk I have to live with every day,” Sharma said. “That’s what you’re constantly thinking about.”

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 while walking on campus last week. “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.

“When asked to describe their overall impressions of the job market, Class of 2025 students most often responded with one word: ‘competitive’,” the report said.

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.

It’s not just graduates entering the workforce who faced stiff competition this year.

“Graduate school admissions have been atrocious because funding got cut for so many groups,” Dartmouth senior Brady Quintard said while eating lunch on the Green last week.

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, or NIH. 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.

“A lot of schools sent emails saying, ‘We encourage you to take your offer early because we may stop allowing people in’,” Quintard said.

Quintard accepted an offer at Yale in March, where he plans to pursue a doctorate in physics, but he still feels uneasy about his future in academia.

“Hopefully funding sticks,” he said.

Dartmouth graduate student Anthony Cheng decided to return to his hometown of Philadelphia to pursue a doctorate in engineering at the University of Pennsylvania because the institution guarantees funding for research, he said.

Cheng had planned for his research to focus on wind turbines, but has since shifted to focus on wind more generally.

“I decided to broaden my research to not just focus on wind turbines because funding for that research depends on whether the government at the time believes in them,” he said while walking across the Green last week.

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.

Millie Keogh, a graduating Dartmouth senior with a degree in English, plans to spend the next year traveling and farming in Europe. Keogh has interned in the publishing industry, worked in museums and is interested in teaching.

“Nothing I’m thinking about seems to fit,” Keogh said while on the Green with her friends.

Keogh wants to go to graduate school eventually but “it’s a lot of money to spend without being sure,” she said.

Emma Roth -Wells can be reached at erothwells@v news.com or 603-727-3242.