Discovery Lab prepares students for peer-led research

The Discovery Lab is Virginia Tech's latest innovation space for student-led, curiosity-driven research. We are excited to bring this space to all students of any major and any college to ask questions about the world around them, use equipment that we have in this space, and understand kind of the data and how those questions can come together to make an impact in the world around them. The Discovery Lab offers a place where a student can come in with a question and test that question and their answer may not be what they want, it may not even be the right answer, but it gives them a place where they can discover what it's like to work in a research environment and collect data on a particular subject matter and let that data lead them to the next phase whatever project they're interested in. Students coming into the Discovery Lab can engage for one semester and really get exposure to some equipment and see how data works in real time or we encourage students to also stay for multiple semesters where they're able to move up in leadership and take ownership over the projects that they're leading and start new ones as well. What I love most about the lab is that you get a broad spectrum of experiences so you're not just working with one instrument in particular you're working with a bunch of them and you're really getting trained on a lot of these instruments that you'll be expected to use once you graduate and you go into the workforce. From my 30 years of experience of teaching large classes, most students are not comfortable with large data sets. This environment provides that opportunity so that they can collect that data, interpret the data, and move forward with confidence because in the future there'll be more people collecting data and more people analyzing data and both of those people need to understand what's good data and what's bad data and this provides them hands-on opportunity to gain that experience.