I’m at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting this week, doing the usual presentation, sitting through other presentations, talking to vendors, and the requisite chit-chatting with colleagues. If you’re there, hit me up. Otherwise, keep reading for a sneak-peak at my presentation.
My Talk at AAFS
Being the one who typically asks the awkward questions, I made sure this year was no different. I was once called a “catalyst” by a colleague. I took that as a compliment, FYI. I don’t mind being A Big Spoon, stirring things up to get a sometimes-too-complacent industry talking. Right now, I’m looking at you, Education. We know students learn best by doing and, rightfully so, that’s what they want. There’s the rub with Forensic Science*. How do you make the illegal suitable for educational purposes? Yes, give them samples to analyze, duh. But that’s not learning “in a way that emulate[s] their future careers,” that’s you, Dr. Biology and Dr. Chemistry, giving them samples to stuff into instrumentation that the students may or may not ever see again, either due to your or their (potential) employers’ lack of resources. Just like your instructors did. Just saying.
This Substack has talked briefly about the gap between what is taught and what is casework, in relationship to who we are as Forensic Scientists*, and how to think about bridging that. The traditional way is with internships but, as my presentation at AAFS asks…
Are internships history?
Internships have been a mainstay for forensic students for decades. For a number of reasons, most notably the COVID pandemic, the role of the internship has come into question. It is a Catch-22: employers look for work experience when they’re hiring entry-level positions but freshly-minted graduates who want an entry-level position have no work experience. In forensic organizations, this “experience gap” is more profound because forensic interns cannot actually perform functions that relate to the mission of the organization: They can’t handle evidence. Unless the forensic organization has prepared a project for an intern, the student tours the lab, sees how that one laboratory does things, and leaves with only a notion of how the forensic profession operates.
Moreover, unpaid internships--and the vast majority of forensic internships are unpaid--carry several moral hazards. One survey of thousands of undergraduates found the average internship costs a college student $6,800. The notion that students should have to forgo pay and incur additional debt to gain work experience begs ethical concerns. College is already expensive, but now students are required to spend their summers paying for an experience with questionable outcomes. The cost of an unpaid internship, especially many first-generation college students, minority students, and any students who don’t come from wealth, keeps them from accessing valuable work experience. According to a recent study conducted on hundreds of undergraduate students, 69% of students claimed that they could not afford to take an unpaid internship. A recent study found statistically significant disproportionalities in students who could afford an unpaid internship across three main criteria: Race, gender, and parent’s education. Only the comparatively privileged can afford to make the "investment" of accepting an unpaid internship.
Second, internships exacerbate the “experience gap.” Managers want employees who can get up to speed as soon as possible but an academic education is not a vocational process intended to slot a graduate into a specified job. Working groups and standing committees have worked to improve forensic educational programs but a recent pre-publication survey reported that laboratory directors would still prefer to hire non-forensic graduates and that FEPAC accreditation of programs means little to them. Employers are desperate for employees who can work cases on Day 1; students are desperate for just about any job but students who had never had an internship received the same number of job offers as unpaid interns. So what is the point of an internship?
Finally, universities often charge tuition for internship classes. On top of the living and potential travel expenses of an internship, the student now must pay tuition. Moreover, the university is profiting from tuition on a class they do not teach; this opens additional ethical quandaries.
The prevalence of new approaches, like micro-internships, and new geography-shrinking technologies, like Zoom, offer the chance to reinvent the transfer of academic learning to career skills.
Thompson, D. “Unpaid internships aren't morally defensible.” Psychology Today, 2019.
Marohl, M., Jensen, G. and Barkholtz, H., 2022. Forensic Science Education: Results of a Needs Assessment. Journal of Analytical Toxicology.