In March, less than three months away from college graduation, Liam Powell received an email from the State Department.
"We regret to inform you that the U.S. Department of State has cancelled the Summer 2025 cycle of the Student Internship Program," it read. "The Department hereby rescinds your tentative offer to participate in the Student Internship Program."
The announcement came weeks after President Trump signed an executive order instituting a hiring freeze across the federal workforce, as a part of his effort to reduce what he considers waste and inefficiency in the government.
Powell, a global health and policy major at Duke Kunshan University, Duke's satellite campus in Suzhou, China, says he wasn't particularly surprised to see the internship program go.
"Honestly, it was something that I was expecting for a long time," he says with a sigh. "I just found it really unfortunate that it happened so late."
This summer, millions of university students are entering an uncertain post-graduation landscape – with the Trump administration's federal hiring freeze, strained research funding, and the slew of executive orders targeting higher education.
For the Class of 2025, the usual anxieties of life after college now come with added pressure and unpredictability. NPR spoke with three graduating students about how they've learned to adapt, move forward and find hope during their final semester of college.
Federal agencies' hiring freeze led to career pivots
Powell wanted to work for the federal government straight out of college. After his sophomore year, he had a summer internship with the United States Agency for International Development, where he worked in a department that provided services like HIV testing, vaccines and funding for HIV/AIDS research in other countries.
A month after the federal hiring freeze, the Trump administration also made sweeping cuts to USAID, after a review of spending designed to "ensure taxpayer dollars were used to make America stronger, safer, and more prosperous." The freezing of foreign assistance grants and awards, in turn, resulted in layoffs of thousands of employees.
With these rapid changes on top of his rescinded internship offers, and watching his mentors and former colleagues pack up their desks, Powell says he saw the "writing on the wall," when it came to his future in international development.
"There's a feeling that's pretty selfish, of knowing that the career field that I've spent so long studying for in my undergrad is going to be in such a state of flux for a long time," he says.
"Talking to a lot of professionals that work in the foreign aid and international development sector, there's a really common perspective that reform is absolutely necessary, but that this isn't the way to do it."
Still, Powell says he was surprised by how fast the administration took action. Throughout his senior year, he worked on a thesis project that compared the agency's objectives under Trump's first administration with former President Joe Biden's.
He planned on adding data from early in Trump's second term but quickly found out that wouldn't be possible. The portals he used to access these documents had been "completely wiped away," he says.
"I wasn't expecting the sort of scrubbing of [USAID initiatives] to go to that level." Powell explains that he was able to finish his capstone project using documents he had downloaded before Trump retook office.
Now, after a semester of contemplation, Powell has decided to pivot. After spending four years in Wuhan, China, at Duke Kunshan University, where he witnessed these policy changes from afar, he's returning to the U.S. to pursue a master's degree in public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Powell says he hasn't ruled out a return someday to government work. "It's still a field that I'm passionate about." He sees the next few years as a detour, and a waiting game: "It's more of delaying what my goals look like and where I want to be."
"It felt like research funding was always going to be there"
Alyssa Johnson spent her senior year at Purdue University taking a step closer to her dreams of becoming a wildlife scientist.
She applied to three Ph.D. programs that focus on amphibian disease ecology – studying how infectious disease impacts amphibian populations and their ecosystems – a topic she's been researching for four years.
But when it came time for interviews in January, and hearing back this spring, she says she felt like there were very few openings.
"Graduate admissions across the country have gone to a very low point, because universities and professors need to protect the people they already have," she explains. "So they're not really letting a lot of people in."
A handful of colleges and universities around the country announced earlier this year that they will pause admissions in graduate programs and freeze hiring, in an effort to cut costs. That's in response to the general uncertainty around higher education, and the rounds of cuts made in federal research funding.
Johnson, who majored in wildlife and spent her summers gaining research experience in labs and in the field, says she felt helpless watching everything unfold. "I thought I did everything right," she says. "But everything that's been going on has kind of changed my life plans."
She believes her field was especially hard-hit, because it uses language around climate change, and the diversity of amphibians and their ecosystems.
Getting rejected from her alma mater, Purdue, and eventually deciding not to pursue one of the programs she'd been accepted to, Johnson says this semester has been very tough, involving long nights of tears and phone calls with friends.
Amid the turmoil, she's now exploring a new interest: working in science communication, helping build public trust around science, and correcting misinformation about scientific research.
Johnson, who's now on the job search, says she's looking forward to reworking her career trajectory:
"Our generation is incredibly resilient," she says. "We were young people through the COVID pandemic. We're now young adults during this extremely tumultuous time in the federal government, and still, I see people continuing to push."
A student body president is still on the job hunt
College was never on the mind of Bobby McAlpine, until his senior year in high school when he was offered a merit-based scholarship from Ohio State's Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
"I found a home there," says the university's outgoing student body president. "I called some of [the staff] my campus aunties, campus uncles. That's where I was able to go to make sure that I not only stayed in college, but I was able to stay afloat."
The office, which opened in 1970, closed during McAlpine's senior year, in February, in response to the Trump administration's crackdown on DEI initiatives on college campuses. A month later, Ohio lawmakers introduced a separate bill on higher education that seeks to limit or eliminate DEI in all public university spaces at the state level.
Before the bill passed in late March, McAlpine organized a campus-wide campaign speaking out against it, and says he collected and delivered more than 400 letters to Ohio's Governor Mike DeWine. The effort, he says, was joined by students from across the political spectrum.
"People feel that their government is making decisions in their name without actually consulting them," he says.
As student body president, McAlpine says he was able to work with the college president to reallocate some scholarships and programs from the office of DEI to other university offices.
"On the one hand, we are an amazing school," he says, giving a shout out to Ohio State's recent national championship in college football. On the other hand, threats at both the national and state levels this semester have left students feeling "really scared," he says:
"That's one of the biggest things that I've heard from students as student body president."
McAlpine says his last semester in the leadership role unexpectedly became one of the toughest. To meet the needs of the student body and to work with school administrators who feel just as lost, "it's significantly grown the job to something that I never thought it would be."
McAlpine says he has delayed his plans to pursue a law degree in the fall.
"I do want to be a lawyer. I do. I want to go to law school," he explains. "But there is so much in flux right now. Why would I place myself in that extreme unknown? Rather than wait a few years to try and see just how this is going to affect everything?"
Despite the uncertainty and fear around higher education, he adds, "there is some positive in it, because it's forcing so many students to form our opinions and form how we want our government to work in the future."
He says his classmates are reading the news, learning how their public university is funded and being more politically active both on- and off-campus.
"Students are determined people," he says. "And silence is not an option anymore."
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