The top 50 companies science students want to work for

There’s a common thread among undergraduates studying natural science, math, and health: They all tend to have the long-term career goal of being dedicated to a cause, says Melissa Bailey, an executive at Universum, a global research and advisory firm.

A new report from Universum supports her observation.

The research firm recently asked 22,976 of these undergraduates to choose the companies and organizations they’d consider working for from a list of 230 options. Next they asked respondents to choose the five employers they most want to work for.

Universum then put together a ranking of the most desirable employers, based on the percentage of students who chose a company as one of their top five “ideal” employers.

“It’s likely that many of these students strongly associate their top-choice employers with a cause they believe in — in this instance, advancing human health,” says Bailey. “This could be an explanation for why health care services organizations, as well as so many government and public sector organizations, performed so well this year.”

The Mayo Clinic, a nonprofit medical practice and research group based in Rochester, Minnesota, came out on top, as a whopping 20.45% of science, math, and health undergrads named it their dream employer.

Here are the top 50:

This article is published in collaboration with Business Insider. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Jacquelyn Smith is the Careers Editor Business Insider. Skye Gould is an Associate Graphic Designer at Business Insider.

Image: Graduate student Katie Bates works in the Nanomedicine Lab at UCL’s School of Pharmacy. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett