We all grew up watching some sort of crime shows, whether it be "Law and Order" when we were sick and stayed home, or when you were older and found the magical world of Netflix and found crime shows. Then you wanted to study criminal justice so you could be just like them. If you were one of those people like I was, you got a rude awakening in college when you quickly had to realize that it was a lot more paperwork, and a lot less finding one single hair that solves the entire case.
If you had that same understanding with another major, the same thing applies, it's a lot more paperwork rather than sitting down with a kiddo teaching them math and all of a sudden the light bulb goes off and they can do anything and everything in mathematics.
It just doesn't work like that.
You get into your intro class and the bubble gets popped, there are pieces of paper that you have to fill out for almost every situation that could have possibly been thrown at you in the field. You sit in a courtroom a lot of time and explain why you are qualified to give the expert testimony you're going to give. You sit there in an office writing reports and analyzing evidence, just to find out something wrong went down and the evidence you spent the last three days analyzing can't be used anymore.
Being a junior criminal justice/forensic major I found out that it was nothing like TV and I was OK with that, I was content with the idea that it was nothing like television, because television made it look way too easy, you look into a scene and all of a sudden you find a microscopic fiber that solves the entire case that proves the ex-husband killed the wife out of an act of passion. Something about that almost turns me off to criminal justice in the sense of giving false expectations. I want a challenge in my workplace, I like puzzles that lost a couple pieces so now you have to go on a wild goose chase in order to find them. I get excited over the idea of going out to a scene and it being "spotless" and then finding the small flaw that gives a lead that can lead to a few other leads, ultimately leading to giving a family closure that they deserve.
Living in a society where television shows my job as an easy "one, two, three" type ordeal and being in the classroom where my job is a true process and not a normal "one, two, three" process, it's more of a skip jump and run into a wall, turn back around and then try and figure out how to get to the finish line, kind of hurts, because it makes our field look easy and doesn't take a lot of intelligence to do what we all do in the CJ field, when in reality it's a really difficult job, every step we take is monitored, and if one of our steps doesn't look right then we get in trouble and we could possibly lose our job because someone did not like the step that we took.
Don't let this be a deterring factor, if you want to pursue criminal justice, or any other major that television has shown to be easy, go for it, and if you end up liking the reality then continue, however, if you don't like it and it's just not the right fit for you, that's OK, too.
