I designed and taught this senior capstone course for the
Certificate in Digital Media Analytics, centered on a deceptively simple challenge: start with a question that matters to you, then figure out how to answer it with data. Students identified their own research questions with social or political impact, located relevant public datasets, and learned to interrogate that data critically — not just technically. While the course built hands-on proficiency in R, the deeper emphasis was on analytical judgment: knowing what a dataset can and cannot support, stress-testing assumptions, and ultimately weaving findings into a coherent, publishable narrative.