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Summary: Becoming a crime scene investigator has become increasingly more competitive, so a bachelor's degree, an internship and research experience is highly recommended to get ahead in the field. Find out how to get a foot in the door of crime scene investigation with helpful information from a forensic chemist in this free video on science careers.
Bethany Pridgen is a forensic chemist working in a local city police department crime laboratory. Over the past year, she has been developing a more functional forensic laboratory for...read more
"Hi! I'm Bethany Pridgen and I'm a forensic chemist. I'm here to talk to you about how to become a crime scene investigator. In recent years, in order to investigate crime scenes, one usually had to go into law enforcement training and become a law enforcement officer. However, as becoming more and more common today for law enforcement agencies to hire civilians to handle their crime scene investigations. The reason they do this is because civilians can concentrate in just that one area and become highly specialized in the area of crime scene investigation. Most agents require crime scene investigators to have at least an associate's degree. However, because of television shows like CSI, NCIS and Forensic Files, it's becoming more and more competitive because everyone wants to get into that field. In order to become more competitive for a crime scene investigation job, you should consider pursuing a bachelor's degree, not just in criminal justice but also in a science such as chemistry, biology or physics. In addition to a bachelor's degree, you may also want to consider pursuing an internship or research experience while you're in school so that you would be more competitive than the other candidates that also have bachelor's degrees. Once you obtain a job in crime scene investigation, your primary focus will be collecting, preserving and often analyzing your items of physical evidence from your crime scene. These crime scenes will include not just the exciting crime scenes that you think about such as homicides and difficult ones like rapes or other assault cases but your day to day duties will include collecting finger prints from burglaries, break-ins and other type scenarios that are more typical crimes that occur daily. Once you collect your evidence, you're responsible typically for bringing the evidence back to the lab packaging it properly and submitting it to the proper laboratory to do the testing. Here, these are just some basic tips for you to pursue a career in crime scene investigation."
eHow Article: How to Become a Crime Scene Investigator
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