Alyssa Frazee became interested in statistics during her AP Statistics class in high school, because stats, she discovered, was the tool that helped us cope with uncertainty. Eventually, she earned her PhD in biostatistics and fell in love with programming. She has since dabbled in security, political forecasting, and fraud prevention, but is now a software engineer when she isn’t doing improv or playing the piano.

This spring’s respondents to the ASA survey of 2020 bachelor’s graduates reported a challenging, stressful, and prolonged job search, although the results also show an unemployment rate roughly the same as the rate for the 2016 and 2017 respondents, higher median salaries, and hiring by a variety of companies.