Long before I knew I would become a data journalist, I decided to ask Binghamton University students about their sex lives.

I was the Release editor at the time, and that survey became part of the paper’s first Sex Issue, which, to my surprise, is apparently still going strong 15 years later. Looking back now, as someone who works with data for a living and teaches data journalism, I can confidently say the survey methodology probably would not meet my current standards. But the basic instinct behind it was sound: If we wanted to know something about Binghamton students, why not actually ask them?

That same instinct has followed me throughout my career.

Journalists are constantly told things. Enrollment is up. Crime is down. A program is successful. Young people are moving away. Students are struggling to connect. Everyone loves Ugg boots again.

My favorite question has always been: How do we know? And how can we quantify it? That, more than math or coding or spreadsheets, is what drew me to data journalism.

Data journalism can sound intimidating, especially to people who went into journalism because they like writing and specifically because they don’t like math. But at its heart, it is still reporting. You are looking for evidence — testing assumptions and trying to understand what is happening. Sometimes that means analyzing thousands of rows in a spreadsheet to find a trend. Sometimes it means filing a public records request. Sometimes it means noticing that a number in a press release does not quite add up. And sometimes, apparently, it means polling college students about their sex lives. The technical skills are useful. Every journalist should know how to sort and filter a spreadsheet, calculate a percentage and make a basic chart. Those skills will make you a better reporter, whether you call yourself a data journalist or not.

But the more important skill is learning not to accept numbers at face value. If someone tells you something increased dramatically, ask: From what to what? If school officials say a statistic proves something is improving, look at the underlying data. If everybody seems to believe something is true, see whether anyone has actually measured it. Then, once you find something interesting in the numbers, go report it.

A spreadsheet can tell you that something changed. It usually cannot tell you why. That still requires talking to people, finding documents, asking follow-up questions and doing the things reporters have always done. That is one of the things I now try to teach my own journalism students. Data is not the story. It is a reporting tool that can help you find the story. I used to say I didn’t go to Binghamton; I went to Pipe Dream University. It was there, in the basement of the Union, where I first learned that I liked asking questions, trying new things and occasionally pursuing ideas that were a little weird. Student newspapers are great places to do that because you have a freedom that can be harder to find later in your career.

So my advice to the current staff is: Take advantage of it. File the records request even if you have never filed one before. Download the dataset even if you do not know what to do with it yet. Learn enough about spreadsheets to start asking questions. Try the ambitious story. Follow the strange idea.

Some of those experiments will fail. Some will turn into stories you are proud of. And every once in a while, something you helped start might still be around more than a decade later.

I certainly did not know while putting together that first Sex Issue that data journalism would eventually become my specialty.

But in hindsight, maybe the signs were there. I was already asking people questions, collecting the answers and looking for a story in the results.

My methodology has just gotten a little better since then.