New career suggestions! (Forensics degrees?)

In My Humble Opinion
1

The to-be Lady Rat is a Russian citizen who has worked as a corporate lawyer for many years. She has a four year degree (in Russia) plus an extra 2 year degree for Russian law of some form.

She’s worried that her English isn’t good enough for legal work and she doesn’t strongly love the profession, so we’re looking at other occupations.

One we’re looking at is forensics. If you know nothing about that, skip to the line break.

Apparently, she already had some course or another in criminalistics back when she was in school, though I don’t know what that actually covered.

However, looking at the job requirements here, they all seem to be pretty hardcore, looking for a four-year Bachelor of Science degree with physics, math, and chemistry - generally focusing on chemistry, and seem to be saying that most of the actual “forensics” stuff is actually taught on-the-job or as an intern.

Going for a full BS in chemistry feels overblown. If we can transfer some of her credits over, then she might be able to get away with focusing on STEM courses, but it would probably mean that she’d be going straight from 6 years working as a lawyer in Russian to just straight, all day calculus, physics, and element valency in English. And, to major in something - like Chemistry - she’d have to do so many credits that, I would guess, we would really be going beyond what’s needed just to work forensics. Not to mention that her brain would explode two days in.

I was hoping that there might be a specialized degree locally that narrowed it down to just the basics that are really a good foundation for the job, but the only options locally seem to be Associate of Applied Science or simple “Certificates”. These don’t seem to really include any chemistry at all, just how to keep track of evidence and stuff (the sort of stuff that they say that they’ll teach you on the job). It doesn’t make sense to spend time or money on something that no employer would take seriously. Though, maybe they do. I don’t know?

Any recommendations? Is there any way to ask a local university to let her do a “Roll-your-own course” and let her just take the classes that seem like they’d actually be useful? If she did that, would an employer take it serious, even without an official Bachelors of Science?

As to other careers options…what would you suggest?

  1. She likes puzzles and mysteries.
  2. She’s worried about being able to write, unless it’s something very formal and technical where it’s sort of a smaller subset of English.
  3. She likes a good work environment that’s not just all-male, insane hours, nor all anti-social people.

If, somehow, her legal background would be a bonus, then that would obviously be a bonus.

2

I was going to suggest joining the US Patent & Trademark Office as a Patent Examiner specializing in chemistry but seems we aren’t hiring any right now.

Maybe see if any of your local patent attorneys need chemistry specialists?

3

Forensic accounting? That’s problem solving and research, requires being detail-oriented, involves a good knowledge of legal matters in a field which is very similar the world over (the specific laws change but the principles of accounting are the principles of accounting) and doesn’t require chemistry or physics. The math involved isn’t terribly high. I don’t know what would be the specific requirements, though. Searching for career in forensic accounting brought up a lot of links, this was the first one, a US site which explains different career paths for accountants.

4

I work in a lab that does failure analysis on electronics. We are EEs.

Over the last few months I have been working on a project that involves failure analysis on drones. The program manager for the overall effort refers to us as “forensics.” On telecons she will say, “Hmm, those results are interesting. Please send the hardware to forensics.” Or, “Can the forensics folks travel to XYZ to participate in testing?”

I and my coworkers chuckle every time she refers to us as “forensics.” It’s become somewhat of a joke in our lab. My only guess is that she has watched CSI too many times.

5

I do computer forensics consulting and teach it. If she has some technical background, or at least aptitude, she could probably get into that relatively quickly, and without having to do calc, chem, etc. Her legal background would help, and if she got into a job dealing with things like threat research, her Russian language skills would be a huge plus (I’m assuming her first language is Russian).

I love computer forensics because I get to solve puzzles and catch bad guys. Also I love writing, and a forensics engagement usually concludes with a nice big report. The report us technical in nature, so it would probably fit with her language skill set.

If she has any interest in that, let me know and I can give some tips on how to pursue it.

Good luck to you both!