DataBridge prepares students for professional workforce

The DataBridge program is an experiential learning program in my research lab. Where we train students from any major and apply data science and have them work with faculty all over campus on their data science heavy projects. And we help them kind of increase their research impact and do a lot of data cleaning and preservation. Joining this lab has basically changed the trajectory of what I wanted to do in the future. DataBridge has prepared me for the work force by exposing me to like what the environment would be like. DataBridge inspired me by making me more curious about what else I could do with data science and like how to better cleaner data set or like how to better visualized data. Just made me more curious about what more or like how I could be better with this. Because it's like less of a classroom environment and more of like, you know, like an actual job. I'd say its giving me a lot more confidence and it's giving me more skills that I can take with me into like jobs in the future. Every student that joins our lab, they sign up for a variable amount of credits, typically 1-3 credits, which determines how many hours a week per work they're working on the research. So what that means for our students is that they can take this research and treat it as one of their restricted electives or one of the things they need for their major course checklists. I hope this program is beneficial for the students in a variety of ways. One learning teamwork, learning applied data science skills, learning to be collaborative and think creatively about solutions that might be needed for the variety of projects that they work on. From there, they're able to have both technical and durable skills that can help them in their next steps after Virginia Tech.