 In this video, we discuss what it means to be a researcher. The word research has many different meanings depending on the context. While they vary in methods and dispositions, researchers do share some generalizable goals and habits of mind, which are transferable between projects, contexts, and disciplines. When approaching college level research, you might feel overwhelmed at first, but whether you realize it or not, you already have relevant experience from daily activities. You might consider yourself a researcher, but you seek out and engage with information every day. This could be as simple as choosing a restaurant, or as complex as deciding what candidate to support, or where you stand on an issue. Even if these examples seem unrelated to the work that you might expect to do in a college class, each involves activating goals and habits of mind that are central to performing academic research. Let's look at five mindsets or goals that you can bring with you to college research. One, knowing your context. Two, asking questions. Three, gathering information from other sources. Four, collecting your own evidence. And five, sharing what you learned. Both inside and outside the classroom, finding information that fits your needs and context requires some reflection on what those needs are. What is your research context? Is this for everyday needs or a college class? The answer to these questions will affect your level of formality and how much you adhere to a set process or guidelines. Your everyday research, like choosing a restaurant, will be a less formal and documented process, while your academic research will require more set guidelines and steps. Research is more than just the process of looking up and synthesizing information. Research begins with inquiry, an active state of questioning and exploration. Your role then is to be curious, to be interested in things that you don't know or understand yet, and to navigate answers you didn't expect. Even ones that go against your prior assumptions or beliefs. The questions you want to answer will help determine the kind of research you do and the kind of information you're looking for. When choosing a restaurant, you might ask, what kind of food do I like? What are my options in the area? What are the highest rated restaurants? Which restaurants match my group's preferences, budget, and dietary restrictions? Similarly, most academic research has a research question at its core. However, consulting an effective research question can be challenging. For example, yes or no questions or questions that have a straightforward answer won't allow much room to shape your research path or to make original contributions. A quick search can tell you that the answer to who is a Virginia Tech's mascot is a hokey bird. On the other hand, questions with too broad a scope, like what challenges do college students face today, will likely overwhelm you with too many potential directions. A productive research question, therefore, is open enough to allow multiple paths but not too broad for your project scope. For example, what are the benefits of on-campus housing for first-year college students? To begin answering your questions, you will gather information from sources to see what work others have already done in this area. This evidence enriches your knowledge and credibility with readers, transcending the limits of your own experience to benefit from the labor of researchers before you. The evidence you gather should meet your research needs and goals. For example, when searching for restaurants, it's helpful to find Yelp or Google reviews from people who've experienced the food and service. While each reviewer's expertise is limited to their first-hand experience, together, they give a sense of what to expect. When researching more complex topics, a different degree of expertise is needed from a variety of source types. For academic research, you'll be gathering information from a variety of source types while considering the reliability, expertise, and point of view of the creator. The requirements of your assignment will also help you determine what kinds of information to explore. Non-academic sources like Wikipedia can be useful during the planning and brainstorming stages even if they aren't cited in your final research product. It is likely you'll need a minimum number of academic scholarly or peer-reviewed sources, but they may not provide all the information you need. For example, you may need more up-to-date information that is difficult to find in peer-reviewed articles because of how long the academic publication process is. Because of the demographics of academic publishing and various academic fields, their voices and perspectives under-represented by peer-reviewed articles, so other sources like blogs, interviews, and social media can fill in some gaps. Your previous experience with the research project might have just been collecting sources on a certain topic, reading those sources, and combining the information presented. However, conducting research can also include creating new knowledge through experiments, interviews, and surveys and communicating the results of that work. This is called original or primary research, and your role as an investigator, controlling the focus of the inquiry. When choosing a restaurant, the question of your friends' preferences and dietary restrictions hasn't already been collected and can't be searched for online, so it requires you to do your own data collection and original research. In your academic research project, you may choose to interview an expert you know or survey your classmates on their experiences. Based on the evidence you gather, both from other sources and your own original research, you will draw a conclusion that answers your initial question. This conclusion is often a temporary end to work that might continue later. For example, your research on restaurants has a temporary end when you select one to go to for this outing, but you'll use the information you gather to select other restaurants in the future. Conclusions in academic research often present the current state of a project and outline areas for future research that could be completed by you or others. This communication of results is an essential part of research because all research is a conversation among many participants. Research as a process can be messy, even for experts. Many of these steps will overlap and blend as gathering evidence leads you to ask new questions and drawing conclusions leads you down new research paths. Research can be daunting and thinking of yourself as a researcher might feel uncomfortable at first, but keep in mind that you have transferable skills and experience from a lifetime of being curious and asking questions. You have unique perspectives and experience that allow you to make original contributions through thought, investigation, and reflection. Stay curious and happy researching.