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A Course Guide to Maximizing Your Undergrad Degree for Forensics

© Michael Decaire

For prospective forensic graduate students, the possibility of leaving an undergraduate psychology program with virtually no knowledge of relevance to their future endeavors is far to realistic. With so many courses offered at a typical university, and with very few actually offering a forensic psychology course, one must be very intuitive to pick the proper courses that will ideally shape their knowledge base.

As I enter my 4th year of the HBSc psychology program I do realize that I have made some wrong choices. I've written this section in a hope to catch those mistakes for you, before it is to late for you to obtain the ideal forensics background.

First of all, any student planning to enter a graduate school should take the following:

statistics, both introductory and advanced
a research methods class
psychometric testing

All three of these classes are usually mandatory for graduate schools and if you don't take them now you'll be taking them with the undergraduates when your in grad school.

As for psychology courses that are particularly relevant to forensic psychology one should consider the following (be aware of the comments regarding which disciplines they would be especially relevant too):

Social Psychology - this class is relevant to virtually all areas of forensic psychology. Studies of violence and aggression can be of particular importance to both criminal profilers and correctional psychologists. How people work together and react socially is of particular relevance to the police psychologist that work with, design programs for, and provide consultation to police officers. Social psychology also has many implications in the court system, for example findings have show that certain personal factors can influence a jury's decision making processes. Abnormal Psychology & Personality Psychology - typically these are two different courses. Both are of extreme relevance to those considering both careers in criminal profiling and correctional psychology. Basically any area of forensic psychology that involves the interaction with criminally insane offenders will find that a strong background in abnormal personality is extremely important.

Child Psychology & Developmental Psychology - again these at some schools may be two different courses. In most circles it is believed that criminals (especially the most sadistic) are created not born. Child and Developmental Psychology allows one to see how a child's personality is shaped, and how certain experiences can sometimes transform into future criminal behavior. Industrial Psychology - any psychologist working directly with a police force will often be asked to perform the tasks of an industrial psychologist. In order to do this effectively one must be trained in that area. Such psychologists would often be used to aid in the hiring of police officers, create work related programs in order to improve conduct/efficiency etc., and to solve certain job related problems/disputes.