High School Students:
How To Become A
Forensic Anthropologist!
Forensic anthropology is the application of the anatomical science of anthropology, and its various subfields in a legal setting. Forensic anthropologist assist in identifying deceased individuals whose remains are decomposed, mutilated, burned or unrecognizable.
Today, forensic anthropology is well established as a discipline in the forensic field. When physical characteristics (fingerprints, face, etc) which could be used to identify a body are tampered with, an anthropologists is called to investigate the remains and help identify individuals by using their bones.
Forensic anthropologists often assist in the investigation of war crimes (genocide, terrorism, etc.) and mass fatality investigations, like natural disasters or epidemics.
So, how do you become a forensic anthropologists?
The idea usually begins with a television show, or if you are like me, death and bones were fascinating to you as a child. There are various ways of arriving at the Forensic Anthropology career, I will explain the way we here is the U.S.A usually go about it.
High School Students:
Take all of your science classes, even physics!
• Biology will help you understand the human body, and how it works.
• Chemistry will help you understand the make up of life, and how the outside world can impact the remains.
• Physics will help you understand what happened the victims remains, example, how to determine if the person jumped, or fell off the roof prior to dying.
Math: Do not neglect it, you will be converting centimeters to feet/inches and so on. You will measure bones with various instruments, and you will need to understand some geometry when digging up a site, or sketching a room.
Arts: Drawing will be a lifesaver when it comes to osteology, not to mention if you must dig up a site. Photography, and working with clay is also good. Sketching the human form, and molding it will give you an advantage for the field.
Gym/PE Class: Stay fit! I repeat, stay fit! You will be working in odd conditions at times. Take on yoga for balancing and strength. Sometimes remains are in hard to reach areas, or you must squat for a long time to observe prior to moving. Fitness will help your back and legs to become strong and not hurt as much. We also spend a lot of time on a desk, so moving and being active is good for us.
English: learn to write proper emails, and the difference between how you write text messages and papers/professional emails.
Also volunteer in hospitals, morgues, old people homes, etc. You are probably used to being around the dead things, but don’t forget to keep in touch with the living and their needs. You need to know both the living world and the dead world, you are going to become the bridge between the two. Build your resume, do good in school and find a university or college that is right for you.
College/University:
Join the anthropology club, first semester, first week, first meeting, be there! (if there is no club, start it!) Go on trips (zoo, cemeteries, visit other schools/their anthropology departments, and go to conferences) ask professors to teach a five to ten minute lecture for the club, bake goods, fundraise, teach other departments and students about us. The friendships made within the club will become your network.
Take all of your general requirement courses seriously! (yes I know it feels like a repeat of high school, but your GPA matters for later on.)
Have a social life! Go out, but be safe. (College will not last forever.)
Make studying fun, create study groups, study outside and test each other.
Meet with your professors, go to their office hours, ask them about their research, a favorite book, or their favorite bone!
Start a dermestid beetle colony (if there is none)!
This is where you start to understand if you are a good fit, and if the work really is for you.
Visit the library, learn to research and write proper documents and papers. You will inevitably write grant proposals and thesis papers that will go way beyond 20 pages, it is normal.
If you can, take up a minor (forensic science is a fan favorite). Even a biology or art minor can help. Minor in something that is like a hobby for you, this will keep you mentally active and distracted for when you need a break from anthropology.
Again, stay fit! And try your best to eat healthy. And network, network, network.
Towards the last two years of your undergraduate degree do research! It can be something simple, like determining the sex between a female pelvis and a male pelvis, but make sure to present it, like at a conference where the Anthropology club will go and see it (winks). Professors might let you tag along and do research with them. Try and see if you can get something published, it can even be for the university’s newspaper, or magazine.
Take undergrad to make yourself distinct, and learn as much as you can.
Get your moneys worth!
Also, find a part-time college job to fund your partying and unhealthy food orders at midnight/three AM.
Plan your future, whether involves moving to a smaller location for work, or getting a higher degree.
Graduate School:
Not everyone will find an anthropology job with a BA or BS degree, the economy is not really our friend here. It might help to move, or relocate out of the big cities.
To PhD. or not? This is a big step that can take years to accomplish. It does not need to happen right away.
Getting a Masters degree is a great option. This is why your GPA, research, papers, and extracurriculars during undergrad were important. Distinct students make it into good graduate programs to do research, and to better learn the field.
Try not to pay for graduate school, often times the programs are funded through scholarships, assistantships, work, or even merit. Graduate school should not get you into more in debt, find the way.
Keep doing everything you did for undergrad, but amp it up. You have more free time to select and narrow your area of expertise (do you want to focus on children, adults, the pelvis, the skull, the process of decomposition, etc.). Make a killer thesis, and present your case. Show the world that you are here!
Also, keep a part-time/full-time job to fund your social life. Make time to hang out with professors (they are human just like you), colleagues, and friends.
Master’s are about two years, Ph.D varies by university or program and are a lot longer. Expect to educate as a Ph.D candidate, you will be teaching others, and make it fun.
Remember that you are more than your research, and your studies, they are a part of you, not the other way around.
Simple Steps:
Step 1: Graduate high school.
Step 2: Earn a Bachelor’s Degree.
Step 3: Complete a Master’s Degree Program. (Optional but you might need it.)
Step 4: Enroll in a PhD Program. (Optional.)
Aspiring Forensic Anthropologists:
• Need at least a master’s degree in anthropology or forensic anthropology to find suitable work.
• Note: A doctoral degree (Ph.D) is needed to pursue research and tenured teaching opportunities in academia.
And Have Fun!
More Posts from Theperpetualscholar and Others
Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital.
Fun Fact: The obsidian blade used during the rituals are sharper than today’s surgical steel.
The image below shows a reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs. Templo Mayor is the pyramid seen center-back, with two temples on top. One temple was dedicated to the war god, Huitzilopochtli, and the other to the rain god, Tlaloc.
Image Source: Rosemania. Reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs - the centre of modern Mexico City. (National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico City). Wikimedia Commons.
The enormous rack of skulls called, Tzompantli, was built in front of the Templo Mayor pyramid. The Mexica people performed human sacrifices to feed the gods. The Aztecs made up the majority of the Mexica people. To them, the skulls would guarantee the sustained continuation of humanity.
There are numerous depictions of tzompantli in Aztec codices. Here is one taken from the 16th Century Aztec manuscript, Codex Duran. Image source: Public Domain.
The Spanish conquistadors marched into Tenochtitlan in 1519. The Spanish saw the skulls and the practice of human sacrifice as barbaric. In 1521 the Templo Mayor was torn down, and the tzompantli paved over. The ruins are underneath of what is known today as Mexico City. Archaeologists are currently studying the skulls to learn about rituals and the postmortem handling of those that were sacrificed.
Christopher Monroe spends his life poking at atoms with light. He arranges them into rings and chains and then massages them with lasers to explore their properties and make basic quantum computers. Last year, he decided to try something seemingly impossible: to create a time crystal.
The name sounds like a prop from Doctor Who, but it has roots in actual physics. Time crystals are hypothetical structures that pulse without requiring any energy — like a ticking clock that never needs winding. The pattern repeats in time in much the same way that the atoms of a crystal repeat in space. The idea was so challenging that when Nobel prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczek proposed the provocative concept1 in 2012, other researchers quickly proved there was no way to create time crystals.
But there was a loophole — and researchers in a separate branch of physics found a way to exploit the gap. Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, and his team used chains of atoms they had constructed for other purposes to make a version of a time crystal2 (see ‘How to create a time crystal’). “I would say it sort of fell in our laps,” says Monroe.
And a group led by researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, independently fashioned time crystals out of 'dirty’ diamonds3. Both versions, which are published this week in Nature, are considered time crystals, but not how Wilczek originally imagined. “It’s less weird than the first idea, but it’s still fricking weird,” says Norman Yao, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author on both papers.
Continue Reading.
so today I learned that when a pregnant woman suffers organ damage (such as a heart attack), the fetus sends stem cells to the damaged organ to help repair it. Apparently it is an evolutionary mechanism; by protecting its mother the fetus also ensures it’s own survival. I am in awe of how incomprehensibly complex our bodies are, truly. (x)
Why Do We Stress Eat?
Whether its exams, work or relationships modern life is pretty stressful stuff. It’s not uncommon for us to turn to food to relieve the often heavy emotional burdens life presents us with. But what drives us to do it? And why are some foods classed as “comfort foods”? More posts like this about the human brain and behaviour on @tobeagenius
Planche casse-pied. Feutre (contour) et marqueurs à alcool (colorisation).
Revising like.
Subjects shown: Advanced dynamics, vibrations and waves, properties of matter, electricity and magnetism. All first year.
for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’
Now if you were like me, this might come to you as a huge surprise because whenever one thinks about Jupiter one is not used to visualizing it with rings around it, but rather as a huge gas giant.
The rings are not prominent
Unlike Saturn’ rings which are bright, the discovery of Jupiter’s wings had to wait till 1979.
This is so because the rings are faint and are only visible only when viewed behind Jupiter and lit up by the sun.
How are they formed ?
Jupiter’s rings are formed from dust particles hurled up by micro-meteor impacts on Jupiter’s small inner moons and captured into orbit.
If the impacts on the moons were any larger, then the larger dust thrown up would be pulled back down to the moon’s surface by gravity (meaning that the dust would not have enough velocity to escape the surface).
The main and halo rings consist of dust ejected from the moons Metis, Adrastea, and other unobserved parent bodies as the result of high-velocity impacts
The rings must constantly be replenished with new dust from the moons to exist.
Actually, there are quite a bit about these rings that we are still in the dark about. And hopefully these would become clearer in the upcoming years.
Have a great day!
How Does Alcohol Make You Drunk?
As you know, I started university this year and since then I have made some embarrassing descisions as a result of alcohol consumption. Making this educational infographic about the science behind drunkeness balances it all out right..?
“Animal blood comes in a rainbow of hues because of the varying chemistry of the molecules it uses to carry oxygen. Humans use hemoglobin, whose iron content imparts a crimson color to our red blood cells. Octopuses, lobsters, and horseshoe crabs use hemocyanin, which has copper instead of iron, and is blue instead of red—that’s why these creatures bleed blue. Other related molecules are responsible for the violet blood of some marine worms, and the green blood of leeches. But the green-blooded lizards use good old hemoglobin. Their red blood cells are, well, red. Their green has a stranger origin: Biliverdin.
They should be dead. Biliverdin can damage DNA, kill cells, and destroy neurons. And yet, the lizards have the highest levels of biliverdin ever seen in an animal. Their blood contains up to 20 times more of it than the highest concentration ever recorded in a human—an amount that proved to be fatal. And yet, not only are the lizards still alive, they’re not even jaundiced. How do they tolerate the chemical? Why did they evolve such high levels of biliverdin in the first place? And why, as Austin’s colleague Zachary Rodriguez has just discovered, did they do so on several occasions?”
Source: TheAtlantic
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