Jana Ramsey

The best advice I received from my field training officer when I first started was to not get complacent. Once we get complacent in our job, then other people's lives are affected, and we just stop doing our job as well as we could, and then it's probably time to look for another career. I still really love what I do, and I don't see myself ever not wanting to be in this field. I just got my master's degree, and I'm starting to teach at the collegiate level, which is exciting, because those students really want to go into the field and they want to learn. I'm excited to be able to spark that fire in those students about what I do.

For specifically young women, what I would say is this field is pretty predominantly women, but you could start out in a field like a police department where I am, being a crime scene investigator, which is mostly male-dominated. You'll most likely be a civilian, and so my advice to young women who want to get into this line of work would be to prove yourself through your education, through your training, and value yourself through your work, and really let your work speak for itself.

I would say the challenges are definitely the ever-changing technology and science behind what I do. A lot of our job is skill-based, and so you really have to keep up with the training opportunities and with the latest technology that comes out in order to process a scene not only efficiently, but there's other times where you need to call in a reconstructionist, whether that's for bloodstain pattern analysis or shooting incident reconstruction. Your documentation of the scene and the evidence that you gather has to not only be up to par for the investigation, but you also need to keep other people in mind that may be looking at your work. Also, testifying in court is extremely challenging because we always say that if you do a good job, then they don't have anything to attack, and they will attack everything. It's really difficult testifying in court, although it happens a lot and we're very exposed to it. You just never know what those defense attorneys are gonna do or say, and someone's life is at risk here. We just had a double murder two-week double murder jury trial that was very intense, but we did our job and we did our job well, we got a lot of compliments, and in the end, justice prevailed.