April 16, 2003
A: FROM MENTOR DENISE HARBERT IN IL
I have two suggestions. First, graduate school is a LONG way off. You
don't need to start thinking about graduate school until your Junior year
in college. Concentrate on getting your 4-year undergraduate (Bachelor's)
degree first. An overwhelming majority of students change their
undergraduate major at least once before they graduate. Although looking
ahead is important, I don't think it makes sense to plan what you're going
to do after your 4 year degree until you're at least half way through
it. You will learn things in college that you didn't know before, which
may lead you to change your mind before you get to graduate school. I
started in math and ended up in statistics, which is related, but not the
same. Plus, most employers, both industry and university, prefer to see
that you attended two different universities for your undergraduate and
graduate degrees. It shows breadth of experience. It would be best for
you to choose one college/university for your 4 year undergraduate degree
and look for a different university for your graduate program. Pick your
first school on the basis of its undergraduate program, not its graduate
programs.

Second, if you're thinking about a career as a CSI (Crime Scene
Investigator), you may not need a degree in criminology or forensic
science. Many different college majors can feed into those careers. It
would certainly help to have courses in criminology and/or forensic science
while you are in school, but you could get a degree in something else and
still pursue that career. Figure out what it is about criminology or
forensic science that interests you. If you like the TV show CSI, then
what is it about the show that you like? Is it catching the "bad guy"? If
so, you might be most interested in being a police investigator, a crime
profiler, or something like that. Criminology or criminal psychology might
be a good way to go. If you like CSI because you like the science or
knowing how the human body works or solving the puzzle, then almost any
science major could feed into a career like that. You could look for
undergraduate programs that have good science departments or an emphasis on
research. Most state universities are good at that and are cheaper than
going out of state. (Incidentally, many graduate programs in SET pay to
sponsor graduate students, so going to a graduate school out of state is
usually inexpensive. It's often cheapest to stay in state for your
undergraduate degree and go out of state for your graduate degree.)

As an example of a science major leading to a CSI career, I have a good
friend who is a graduate student in biochemistry at a university that has
an outstanding biochemistry program, but is not known for criminology or
forensic science. She thought she'd pursue a career doing some kind of DNA
research in a university lab (e.g., studying and discovering new things
about DNA). Now that she's getting close to completing her PhD and has
spent a significant amount of time in a university lab, she's beginning to
have second thoughts about whether she really wants to do that for
life. Instead, she has started thinking more about a hobby of hers, which
is reading books and watching TV shows about murders and other violent
crimes against people. She is now thinking about pursuing a career as a
CSI. Because she already knows a lot of scientific trivia about crimes and
has extensive lab expertise with DNA and biochemistry, she can probably get
a job as a CSI in virtually any state without having to get an additional
degree in criminology or forensic science. She might need to pass a
certification exam, but any CSI department would be lucky to hire someone
with her extensive and up-to-date knowledge of DNA.

As another example, if you think about the characters on CSI, Grissom's
expertise is entomology, a branch of zoology that deals with the study of
insects. There has never been any discussion of him having a degree in
anything other than entomology and he runs the CSI department!

Hope this helps. Good luck!