So you want to be a forensic scientist? Let me tell you what it’s like.
A friend recently asked if I would allow his nephew to interview me. Nicholas was pursuing his degree with the goal of becoming a forensic scientist. He had been assigned a research project to interview one. I agreed to be his subject.
The long list of questions and detailed answers I gave would be too lengthy for a LinkedIn post, so I will summarize here.
When I got started fifty years ago, there was almost no competition to enter the field. It had not yet been glamorized in movies and TV series. In contrast, the competition now is intense. High school students planning their future are enticed by the romantic notions of what they have seen in fictionalized stories about forensics. So let me dispel some of those ideas.
First of all, everything you see on television or in a movie is a lie. A freakin’ lie. There is no Abby in the basement at NCIS who is an expert in all fields of forensics. NCIS sends their evidence to the Defense Forensic Science Center (DFSC) for analysis. When I was the latent print instructor for DFSC, there were approximately 350 people doing the job that Abby did alone on TV and nobody had a stuffed hippopotamus that farted.
Forensics is mostly hours, days, weeks, months, years, of boring, meticulous, routine examinations of evidence. It involves instrumentation and almost never results in earth shattering revelations. Well over half your time will be spent in taking notes, writing reports, and reviewing notes and reports of others. If public speaking frightens you, the anticipation of adversarial testimony will probably terrify you. Most opposing attorneys are disdainful, but polite. Once in a while, you will be cross-examined by an attorney who will make you wish you were cage fighting a rabid pit bull instead.
You will have a few cases which, in spite of your best efforts to stay emotionally detached, will leave you emotionally scarred. You may have a few in which the reward of providing the crucial evidence to solve a horrendous crime makes your whole career worthwhile.
In some places, you may earn a very good salary. In some police departments, as a civilian employee, you will be relegated to the status of second-class citizen earning low pay and minimal benefits. There is little chance you will retire wealthy enough to travel the world and then buy a motorhome to tour America.
But I have loved this career. I have lived paycheck to paycheck most of my life and live now in an economical apartment complex for seniors over age 55. It’s not a bad life, but nothing like you see on TV or envision in your fantasies.
So I gave Nicholas the same advice I gave my daughter, @KatrinaWertheim-Willey. First, take a map of the United States (or whatever country you live in) and pick the place you want to live. Move there.
Second, forget your college major. Only a minority of people end up working in their major field. Instead, just find a job doing something you enjoy.
Third, live within your budget. There are two ways to do that. One is to earn more than you spend. The other is to spend less than you earn. Follow the second path. Live cheap.
Move where you want to live. Do something you enjoy. Live cheap. That is my advice to all young folks starting out in their careers.
Here is the full transcript of the interview:
1. Why did you choose to pursue forensic science as a career?
Funny story, but true. My Dad owned a bakery. I grew up working all phases of production from bread to cookies to cake decorating to pastries and donuts. When I graduated from college with a BS in geophysics, there weren’t any jobs available in that field. So I opened a bakery in a small town. A year later, a supermarket chain opened an in-store bakery in their outlet. That put me out of business. But by then, I knew every cop in town on a first name basis because they had learned that the donuts came off the fryer at 4:00 AM and would come in through the back door for a “security check” and to get free donuts. When I closed the bakery, I needed a job. They were hiring. That was in the fall of 1973.
2. What level of education is required to have a career in forensic science? What courses are necessary to be qualified and well prepared?
A bachelor’s degree is required most places, but there are so many master’s degrees on the market it may even be hard to break into the field with an MS degree today. In general, I recommend a strong chemistry background. But if you’re going into DNA, then there are requisite courses in biology, genetics, and statistics to even apply for a job. You would have to check with specific agencies and in specific disciplines for their requirements.
3. Was an internship needed before you could start working professionally? If so, how did you go about finding an internship?
To the best of my knowledge, internships are not required anywhere. But as a practical matter, I strongly recommend doing internships wherever you can in whatever discipline you think you might be interested in. In one of the labs where I worked, we would have upward of 60 applications for every opening. But almost every vacancy we filled was with a previous intern. Some labs have formal internship programs, and some universities have arrangements with certain labs. But you can always contact a lab directly and ask about doing an internship there, regardless of whether there is a formal structure established between that lab and your university. If you can work several summer internships into your college program, so much the better. And if you can try different disciplines, it would give you a better idea of what you might like.
You might also think about getting your degree and if you can’t get into a forensic lab, find an agency that has a crime scene unit separate from the lab. If you can get into crime scenes and you’re qualified for a forensics position in the lab, you might be a shoo-in for promotion when there is an opening in the lab.
4. What is the competition like in this field? How much experience is needed to stand out against others pursuing this career?
Competition is intense. When I got into the business, it was easy to break into the field. But with so many TV programs involving forensics, interest in the field has mushroomed. Work towards an MS in Forensic Science with a strong chemistry background, do as many internships as you can fit into your summers or even during regular semesters, and be willing to start in a low paying laboratory to gain experience. You can move to a higher paying lab once you have experience.
The Army used to hire MS grads with no experience to train for deployable jobs, which was an excellent way to get your foot in the door and pay off college loans. Watch www.usajobs.gov and use a wide variety of search terms. It can be tricky to find and filter out the right job announcements on that site. Also, try to figure out the key words in the job announcements and use those exact words and phrases in the application. Those on-line applications are not read by people but are evaluated and forwarded to the agency with the opening based on automated word search technology. You might be the best qualified applicant in the pool, but if you don’t use the right magic words, your application won’t even make it to the review panel at the hiring agency. Likewise, unqualified applicants make it through to the interview because they have learned to game the system.
For state and local jobs, use all the internet search tools you can find. Especially, check the websites of professional organizations. https://www.theiai.org/job_listings.php and https://webdata.aafs.org/public/jobs/postings.aspx might be good places to start. If you see a job at an agency you think you might like, but you don’t meet the minimum qualifications, call and talk to them.
When you get a job interview, don’t be a slouch. Dress professionally. Go in prepared. Make 8 or 10 presentation folders, each with a one-page cover sheet listing your career objectives and why you would be the best choice for the job, include your CV, your college transcripts, a list of extra-curricular activities, awards you received, etc. When you go in for the interview, introduce yourself and hand each interviewer one of the presentation folders from a professional briefcase you will be carrying.
5. What is a typical workday like for someone working in forensic science?
First of all, forget everything you ever saw on TV or in the movies about what forensic scientists do. Those scripts were all written by colossal liars. Big, fat, m-effing liars.
What does a forensic scientist do in a typical day? That varies drastically, depending on the laboratory and the discipline. There is no one-size-fits-all workday in a lab. Don’t think it’s going to be all fun like you might see on TV or in the movies. Much of forensic science is sausage making – put the meat and seasoning into the hopper, turn the crank, and out come the results. I think no matter what lab or what discipline, well over half of your time will be spent on the drudgery of note taking and report writing using mindless forms that function in a totally non-linear way, using a plethora of drop-down menus and clicking a myriad of boxes. You won’t be like Abby playing with her farting hippopotamus in the basement at NCIS. That job doesn’t exist. Mostly, forensic science is boringly repetitious and overburdened with paperwork.
And if you don’t love public speaking, you will get stressed to the point of a nervous breakdown as you sit on a hard wooden bench for hours waiting to testify. Then you get sworn in and sit at the focal point of the courtroom with the judge, jury, numerous attorneys, police investigators, and the defendant and all the family members glaring at you. The prosecutor asks you questions in a civil manner, but the defense attorney may attack you in ways more degrading than you ever imagined. Personally, I love an aggressive attack by an angry, adversarial attorney when I’m on the witness stand. I love the game. Most expert witnesses, especially the new ones, absolutely hate it and get stressed to shivers and tears. But again, don’t believe what you see on TV and movie courtroom dramas. They are scripts written by liars.
Most people can’t take an aggressive cross-examination without being rattled. I’ve known some to quit the field altogether because they couldn’t handle the personal assault of a demeaning cross examination in front of a judge and jury. And it isn’t just about science, it can get deeply personal.
6. What is the typical work environment for this career? Do you typically work in a lab/office, and do you sometimes have to take work home?
You will probably never take work home. Laboratories have strict policies against removing evidence from the controlled, secured laboratory environment. You will probably have to put your evidence into a personal locker every time you leave the room where you are working. You will probably have a small cubicle in a cube farm where you are expected to do your paperwork and a bench in the lab where you do your evidence examinations. You cannot take any food, snacks, or drinks back into the laboratory area.
You will probably not be allowed to do any personal work on your lab computer, no social media or web surfing, but some agencies allow limited personal use for those tasks. Everything you do on your work computer may be monitored and read by others and may be subject to disclosure under court order. You cannot do any work-related stuff on your home computer or by text or email from your personal phone. The two areas of your life must be strictly partitioned off from each other. In some labs, the confidentiality mandate may be so strong that you can’t even talk to your spouse about what you did at work that day.
7. Is the workload heavy or does it vary?
Most labs expect you to do a “thorough and complete” examination in every case. You will probably have a backlog of cases measured in months or years. You will probably not be allowed to work overtime for pay, but most labs will let you work comp time and save a couple hundred hours of leave that way. When you want to take vacation or holidays, you will probably have to balance that with all the others in your work group. If there are important rush cases or if a trial is scheduled, you may not be able to take time off when you want.
8. Are there a lot of locations to work at for this career, or would moving closer to locations be necessary?
If you work for a city police department, you will probably have only one lab in a central location. If you work for a state lab, there will probably be a main lab in the state capital and satellite labs in several other locations around the state. But in that case, you would be hired for one specific lab, not given your choice of which place you want to work. Some Federal labs have only one huge lab, others have several labs around the country. If you get a job with the Defense Forensic Science Center, after training you would serve six-month deployments anywhere in the world, then serve a year or more back at the main lab before your next deployment. On deployment, you may be working 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days per week, with only a few breaks during your deployment. But the overtime pay would allow you to come home with a huge wad of cash.
9. What were things like for you when you first started your career? Did you do a lot of learning on the job?
You would never start the way I did. I began doing crime scene exams in 1973 with absolutely no training whatsoever. “There’s a camera in the glove box and a fingerprint kit in the trunk. Handle it,” was the only instruction I received. I was sent to a two-week class in crime scene processing and fingerprint comparisons four years later. Today, you would probably get two to five years of training before you are cut loose to work on your own. You would probably have 12 or more training modules to work through, each on in sequence that you would have to pass with written and practical exams before proceeding to the next module. You would probably ask “Will this damned training never end?” before it’s over. What you would take with you from a master’s degree, or even a PhD, would not qualify you to do the work. Your degree would only get you through the application process to the interview stage. Even then, you would have to be in the top three to five applicants out of the pool to even make it to the interview.
10. Is there anything you wish you knew before pursuing this career?
I never dreamed of going into forensics, much less planned to do so. It was purely by accident that I got into a field I love so much. I would never make it today. Kids today are so much smarter and better educated than me that I wouldn’t even make it to the job interview if I had to start anew. But the one thing you need to know in the depth of your soul is what I said in the first sentence of the answer to question 5 above. This is NOT what you expect it to be if you are basing your desire to go into forensics on some romantic notion gathered from movies and TV shows. But on the other hand, it is a highly rewarding career, not in the day-to-day humdrum of mundane, repetitive tasks, but in the big cases a few times during a career when you make all the difference in taking some really bad dude off the streets and putting him away for life. Or if, like me, you eventually end up doing a few defense cases, an even bigger reward comes from catching crooked or stupid cops who are going after an innocent person and you get to save that person from being convicted and going to prison.
11. What was one obstacle that you faced during your time as a forensic scientist, and how did you overcome it?
The biggest source of frustration I have experienced is terrible managers. I’ve worked for over a dozen supervisors and laboratory directors at city, state, and federal levels. Some of them were great bosses, people I would have followed into hell if they asked me. Other bosses have been so terrible I would quit and move on. I’m too irascible to work for a person I can’t respect. The longest I’ve ever stayed anywhere was nine years, and I’ve made it that long twice in my career. The average length of employment for me was about six years. It has been my observation that the people who really, truly love their job cannot work for an asshole. But the bored 40-hour a week mope who doesn’t love the work, but who is there mostly for a paycheck, can put up with just about anything. I guess that applies to any job, not just forensics. I would say the best way to judge how good a place is to work would be to check into the turnover. For example, at my last job, turnover in the DNA unit was over 100% ever few years. That tells you something about the supervisor in that unit. In latent prints, turnover was virtually zero until a massive walk-out last October over poor management by the lab director.
12. How much would you expect the salary to be for a beginner in this field? Is the wage livable?
When I got into the business, I was a cop with police benefits and retirement plan. Of course, I didn’t stay with that job, but in the 1980s and 1990s, the field underwent civilianization. That process split crime labs in two different directions. Some police agencies saw civilianization as a way to save money by paying the civilians less than the officers and giving them fewer benefits. Other police agencies saw it as a way to ensure professionalism and quality work from the scientists.
I have observed the tendency of the police to pay civilians the same respect their administration does. In other words, in the low paying agencies, the civilians are held in contempt and the greenest rookie coming out of basic police academy thinks he knows more about forensics than you do. On the other hand, in a high-paying agency, the officers respect the scientists and value their opinions. I would avoid any agency where the base salary for forensic scientists is less than a police officer makes when he gets off probation. In my job with the Defense Forensic Science Center, I was close to top salary of about $120,000 per year with no supervisory or managerial responsibilities. When we got a new lab director who was a poor manager and I quit there, I took a 50% pay cut and went to a city lab for $60,000 per year, which was still way above the bottom of the scale there.
The point is that salary is wildly variable. If you want the highest salaries, go for a career in the Federal system at one of their labs. But check into the turnover rate at any lab before you accept an offer. The only way to get rich in forensics is to climb the ladder, live cheap, and make good investments. Or, as I tell the convenience clerk on the rare occasion when I buy a lottery ticket, “The lottery isn’t the best retirement plan in the world, but it’s the only one I’ve got.”
13. Do you frequently work with other people, or do you more often work independently in this field?
Labs today are teamwork. If you have a good supervisor and a good team, it can be a great job. If you have a slacker or a drama queen on the team, things can get very divisive and tense. If you watch NCIS and think Abby in the basement is real, you are sadly mistaken. NCIS does not have a forensic lab. They use the Defense Forensic Science Center, which has probably about 600 forensic scientists doing the job of Abby. I used to work with a short, fat, balding little guy who like to introduce himself as Abby from NCIS.
14. Do you make a lot of appearances in court to testify on your findings when working on a case? Do you testify in every case?
In the 1980s working in a city lab, I testified three to five times a week. In the 1990s and early 2000s working in a state lab, I testified maybe once a month. In the final years, 2016 to 2022, I didn’t testify once a year. A lot of that depends on your prosecutor and how much they plea bargain cases. It also depends on the particular discipline you go into. You will testify in only a tiny percentage of cases you examine.
15. Is this a good career to pursue in this day and age? Does it have a promising future?
First of all, know this: The #1 ethical failure of forensic scientists, according to the American Academy of Forensic Science, is misrepresenting their credentials. Never fudge or exaggerate your qualifications. I have seen otherwise good people get fired when it was discovered they embellished their CV a little.
Second, when you go in for an interview, don’t think the interview is one-way. Make it a two-way street. Ask questions to find out if you really want to work for this agency. I have walked away from otherwise good job offers because I could discern during the interview process that the lab would be a toxic work environment (and I don’t mean chemically toxic).
When my daughter graduated from university, she and I were walking down the sidewalk alone one day during the week and she said, “Well, Dad, all the other parents are giving their kids advice this week. So let’s get this over with. What advice do you have for me?”
I thought a minute and said, “First, take a map of the United States and figure out where you want to live. Then move there. Second, forget your major. Almost nobody builds a career in their college major. Just find a job doing something you enjoy. And third, live within your budget. There are two ways you can do that. The first is to earn more than you spend. The second is to spend less than you earn. Go for number two. Live cheap. So my advice is to move where you want to live, get a job doing something you enjoy, and live cheap.”
She replied, “That’s not what the other parents are telling their kids.” And I responded, “Well, the other parents are wrong. Move where you want to live, do something you enjoy, and live cheap.”
In any government job, your working conditions and salary are subject to the vagaries of the politicians in office. In the current environment of tax cuts and cutbacks of government services, that means too few employees to do the work and salaries/benefits that, for the most part, are not competitive with the private sector. To turn that around would take a massive shift in voter preferences to elect politicians who promise to raise taxes and increase the size of big government. You can figure the chances of that happening for yourself.
Knowing what I know, if I were graduating from college again today, I probably would not go into forensics. It is mostly a boring, mundane job. But on the other hand, it does have its rewards. If you can put up with bad managers, it offers a steady salary and job security. And as far as bad managers, the pendulum swings both ways. I have observed about a five-year cycle of good management, then bad management, then good again. The job offers the possibility of advancement, but you have to pay your dues at the bottom rung of the ladder for a decade before you can expect to climb into supervision. Twenty or thirty years down the road, maybe you would get into lab management. But never allow yourself to be deluded into thinking that you will skyrocket to success and climb to the top of the heap in the first year or two. You’ll still be in training on the job and struggling to pass your tests to become approved for independent casework.
Of my three kids, one followed me into forensics. After a decade, he went back for an MBA and went into work as a “Project Manager” for a contractor of support services for federal law enforcement agencies. One of my other kids worked for a mining equipment company for a few years, then started her own consulting business working for mining companies, mining equipment companies, and space tourism start-ups.
My third and youngest kid was the smart one. He flunked out of high school and got his GED, joined the Navy, and announced he would put in 20 years and retire, then get another job with another federal agency and put in 20, then retire and double dip by age 59. It didn’t quite work out that way. He put in 23 years with the Navy, then then got a cush, high paying job with Lockheed Martin, where he works now. All three of my kids have done far better in their careers than I did if you measure it by money, but the job satisfaction I have experienced from the small percentage of big cases I’ve worked outweighs the money. I’ve put a few really evil guys on death row, and I’ve saved a few innocent people from being convicted. Maybe a half-dozen big cases in my career have made the whole thing worthwhile.
So, would I recommend going into forensics? Sure, but don’t get married to the career. Try it if you can get a foot in the door through an internship. If you like it, stay. If it’s not what you expect, move on to something else.
Move where you want to live, do something you enjoy, and live cheap.