By Melinda Fricke One of the most exciting parts about working for D-Lab is that in many ways, it’s an organization for researchers, by researchers. Many of us on the D-Lab start-up team are graduate students in the social sciences, and we’re working to improve access to data-related resources on campus for all social science graduate students. As researchers ourselves, we can put together a wish list of what resources we’d like to have access to. And as D-Lab team members, we can find a way to implement changes to help all social science researchers here at Berkeley. That feels really empowering – and exciting! We are a relatively small team, though, and we want to be cautious of generalizations based on small sample sizes! This is where you come in: you can help us make D-Lab into what you want it to be. Help us generalize beyond our team: what resources do you need more of, or easier access to, in order to do your research more easily, efficiently, and effectively? In the early days of my research, for example, I spent countless hours dealing with R, not understanding why it wouldn’t just do what I wanted it to! Imagine if there had been a workshop series for beginning social science researchers on using R for regression analyses. Or a working group where novices and more advanced grad students got together to pool their knowledge, and help each other out. There’s no reason why these types of resources can’t exist in a centralized, well organized, and well advertised forum, where they’re easily accessible for everyone in the social sciences. We just have to figure out what we need. Do us all a favor, and fill out our survey on data resources! We hope to check back in soon with some analyses of our data-data!