Last week on our blog we posted a piece on how TV shows can give people career ambitions that are based on unrealistic portrayals of the job that they’ve decided they want to have. While we mentioned doctors and lawyers as two classic examples of this phenomenon, there is another career which is particularly misrepresented on TV: the forensic scientist. In this case, however, the depiction of the career is so far-fetched that it probably puts more people off it than it inspires. As we’ll see today, this is a real shame, as forensics is a great field for anyone who wants to apply specialist scientific knowledge to real-world situations.

If we are to believe the work of certain police dramas–and, it must be said, those in particular that come from the USA–forensic scientists have mastered every single branch of science under the sun. They can perform autopsies, have an encyclopedic knowledge of every chemical compound known to man, and have limitless access to all sorts of exciting gadgets and doo-dads that help them catch bad guys, some of which clearly don’t exist in real life. And then on top of all that they spend their time actually interrogating, chasing or even shooting suspects. Oh, and let’s not forget their amazing ability to come up with just the right pun or one-liner as they stand over the corpse of another tragically murdered innocent.

This depiction of scientists involved in law enforcement is, put simply, rubbish. But that doesn’t mean, however, that the real forensics teams that help solve crimes don’t do an exciting or worthwhile job. It’s just that, in the real world, any one human being can only reasonably develop one field of scientific expertise, and that becomes the area in which they work. So a geneticist works with DNA, and so on.

All this means that the terms forensics covers a very wide range of job roles, with forensics teams being comprised of a large unit of specialists, rather than a couple of people who know how to do absolutely everything. And they usually leave the actual police work to the police.

The range of specialties involved in forensics means that it’s a field that people can get into from a wide range of subjects. Aside from the roles available to people with degrees from laboratory-based degrees such as genetics or biology, there are also roles for people from a less scientific background.

For example, forensic archaeology is a vital aspect of police forensics work; they apply the skills we commonly associate with things like digging up old coins to methodically process a crime scene, ensuring that no small pieces of evidence are missed. Forensic anthropologists, meanwhile, carry out tasks such as examining long-buried human remains, analyzing them for clues regarding causes and time of death or even identifying a person from small fragments of their remains.

The goal behind all this is to solve instances of wrongdoing and crime, whether they took place yesterday or five hundred years ago. You’ll obviously need to study for a degree related to the branch of forensics you’d like to go into–and quite possibly do postgraduate training after that–but if you like the idea of being able to apply an academic subject that you love to exciting real-life scenarios, this is certainly a career worth thinking about.