Before you set your heart on a career in forensic science, make sure you know what you are getting into. It isn’t like what you see in popular TV shows, and it would be terrible to find that out after going to school for 4 — 6 years.
Do some volunteering/internship while in college, so you see what is really going on in a crime lab.
Original article posted here:
How to crack the CSI effect
TV shows are great recruiting tools but scientists tell Chee Chee Leung the reality is very different.
MEGAN BISH always had a thing for crime stories. Growing up, she loved murder mysteries and in high school she got hooked on TV dramas such as CSI, where science is used to catch the bad guys.
So when it came to her honours year at La Trobe University, the biotechnology student enlisted in a forensic science research project where she used chemistry to solve real-life questions, just like the stars of CSI. The power of TV to attract students such as Ms Bish to forensic science was under the spotlight at a conference in Melbourne this month, as international and Australian speakers explored the “CSI-effect”.
Forensic science, the application of science to the law, is practised in the criminal area and in insurance inquiries and air-traffic incidents.
Participants at the International Symposium on the Forensic Sciences heard at least 17 institutions in Australia offer forensic science programs.
Flinders University forensic science professor Hilton Kobus says the CSI effect is positive; it boosts forensic science’s profile and attracts the young: “The more students we get doing science, the better.”
But Professor Kobus says the downturn in recent years could be due to disappointment that the courses focus on fundamental science — chemistry, biology and physics — and not crime busting or the limited number of jobs in Australia. Through her studies working on a research project with the Victoria Police Forensic Services Centre at Macleod, Ms Bish has discovered that forensic science is vastly different to that shown on screen. “On TV, they portray the one person as doing everything: going out to the crime, doing the crime scene investigation and coming back to the lab,” the 21-year-old says. “Whereas I would get the job just running the samples in the lab, so it’s not really related to the crime.”
Fellow student Ellen Reid, 25, who has completed a forensic science honours year project and is studying for a PhD in analytical chemistry, agrees the TV depiction is unrealistic. “We’re more behind the scenes, whereas the shows portray them as being the upfront person who goes out and does everything,” she says. “And the actual research part of it is quite a long, drawn-out process. It’s not quite as flashy and easy as what they have on the TV shows.” At Deakin University in Geelong, demand for the bachelor of forensic science dropped this year, pushing entry scores — once in the low 80s — down to the 50s. Applications for next year are returning to normal but program director Kieran Lim says competition from other courses may be behind the slide.
Associate Professor Lim says some students enter the course with unrealistic expectations. “The CSI-type program … brings them into the course but it also puts shutters on their expectations of different career paths,” he says. “They think that forensic science is all about crime and criminals and that’s not always the case.”
To bust myths about the roles of forensic scientists in crime investigations, Victoria Police wrote a document titled Is it like CSI? to explain their work and attract the right people.” CSI depicts a number of roles combined into one,” says the department’s Rebecca Heyes. In these shows scientists process the evidence and interview suspects. In Victoria, police investigators conduct these interviews.
Anecdotes suggest the CSI-effect has an impact on the public and juries, building an expectation that forensic evidence is needed to crack a case. A US forensic scientist told the conference that prosecutors sometimes asked for tests that had no scientific merit, just because the jury expects to see them.
This experience with juries versed in TV forensic science was echoed by Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine deputy director David Ranson. “They think we should have access to fancy lasers and we can reconstruct the blood splatter in every case, whereas often that may not be evidentially necessary.”
The shows have even provided some offenders with ideas about how to cover up their crimes.
A Queensland man who had murdered his wife raced out to an auto supply store to buy a UV light, hoping it would make the blood stains “glow” as he had seen on TV.
Although Ms Bish and Ms Reid have discovered that life in forensic science is not quite CSI, both still want jobs in the industry, saying they like using science to solve problems that will make a difference. “I enjoy the challenges of getting something that’s unknown and coming up with the answers to it,” Ms Reid says. “Where you can actually see results … and it’s good for the community.”
No related posts.
