How To Become A Forensic Scientist

Hello! I'm Sherridan Hughes. I'm a career consultant with career analysts. I'm going to talk to you today about how to getting to various careers.

I'm going to tell you about how to become a forensic scientist. Forensic scientists really tend to crime scenes and it's nothing like the… what we see in CSI. Nobody's running around with guns.

It's a very meticulous job where they would be collecting trace evidence of very minute detail. Every contact leaves a trace. So, the forensic scientists are aiming to collect those traces and to provide evidence in court to support prosecution.

All forensic scientists are going to have a degree. It's very difficult to progress purely from the assistant role, and the degrees would be in Biology, Pharmacology, very much a scientific or perhaps material science background. There are degrees in the subject now increasingly so, those are not actually recognized by the forensic society.

So you need to make sure that the degree that you took will be a verified course. Obviously, things do move very fast in forensic science and it's still quite a technical role. Now, you'll be looking at DNA, fingerprinting and fingerprinting generally blood and body materials, and things like that.

So, you would need to be technically minded, good with IT, with also quite good at being able to write reports and to produce reports, and also to perhaps willing to attend court, and to speak in court in support of the evidence you found. Therefore you need to be a good communicator. You need to be very analytical.

You need to be a good problem solver to be able to piece together what's happened, and you need be very thorough and in depth in scientific background. But on the job, you will then also trained up further as new technologies come in. it's really important to realize that it is although there are a lot more opportunities these days, it is actually a very competitive field.

And I think for something like 30 agencies, there were 500 applications. So, you'll have to be aware that you're going to need to get as much relevant experience before you go. Obviously you need to be sensitive nature of the field and it is quite difficult to get relevant experience but there are many new graduates that actually start in an assistant role, and then progress on to being a forensic scientist fully pledged.

So that's what you need to able to do in order to progress to having a successful career in forensic science. .