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Focus on Career
Internships
Perhaps the best way to find out if a career in forensic science is right for
you is to work as an intern for a few months in a forensic laboratory. Most
crime laboratories offer internships once or twice a year, so opportunities
are available for the right students. Being in the laboratory every day and
seeing the operations from the inside can shed light on the way things
work there. Internships help students see what their forensics jobs would
really be like—and it’s usually not how they are presented on television. If
a person goes into a career with unrealistic expectations, he may find him-
self disappointed and presented with the choice of either working at a job
he does not love or leaving and risking the financial hardship that comes
with changing careers. Sometimes, a lucky student will manage to land a
paid internship, though these are rare in forensics because of laboratories’
tightly controlled funding. Keep in mind that the internship experience is
more valuable than most college classes. It is worth a financial sacrifice to
find out if forensic science is the right field for you.
On-the-Job Training
Because forensic physicists are asked to handle such a wide array of work,
they must be ready to cope with a wide variety of different situations. No
college coursework or laboratory experience can prepare a student for all
the problems that can arise in the daily operation of a laboratory. To cope
with this, most forensic laboratories hold regular on-the-job training semi-
nars for their employees. In addition to seminars, most forensic laboratories
require that newly hired forensic scientists work closely with more experi-
enced staff who are qualified experts in their fields. New employees are not
