The ISHI Advisory Committee was asked what advice they’d give themselves at the beginning of their forensic science careers. The answers reveal something worth sitting with: most of the hard-won wisdom has less to do with science than with the person doing it.
Pam Marshall’s answer is about mistakes.
“Be patient with the process. Don’t take things personally. Mistakes. Rejections just help you grow.”
She’s direct about the fact that she didn’t do this early on. “I took things very personally, and now I see them as the lessons that they were meant to teach me.” The advice she’d give her younger self is the thing she had to earn by doing it wrong first.
Shena Latcham’s advice is more blunt.
“Shut your mouth and open your ears.”
She explains: “I’m a talker. And you come into this industry so gung ho. But there’s so much to learn.” Her point isn’t that new analysts don’t have value — it’s that the experienced people around them do too. “These OG analysts, which I’m now in, they have a lot of experience to share. And you can really learn from their experiences and not make the same mistakes.”
The last line lands cleanly: “You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.”
Meradeth Snow’s advice is threefold, and the third part is the one she says she still hasn’t mastered.
“Don’t get in your head so much. Be nice. And also it’s okay to say no.”
She’s candid about the cost of saying yes to everything — particularly in academia, where the pressure to take on more is constant. “There’s been plenty of instances where I probably could have stepped away from certain things, and it wouldn’t have affected me, and I probably would have had a little bit of a better mental health because of it.”
She’s honest that this is still a work in progress. “I am extremely awful at this.”
Dawn Romano’s advice is about confidence — specifically, the kind she wishes she’d had earlier.
“I said even up until a few years ago, I second guessed myself all the time. I’d go to these ISHIs and be like, oh, these people up there, they’re so much smarter than me.”
Twenty-plus years in, she knows differently. “I should have confidence in what I know because I’ve been in this field 20 something years now and I do know the answers. I just don’t speak up as much as others.”
The advice she’d give herself: demand more confidence. Not borrowed from someone else — earned, and claimed.
Meet the ISHI Advisory Committee
Dawn Romano is the DNA Technical Lead and Forensic Supervisor of the Biology Unit at Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Forensic Services Division.
Shena Latcham is a Forensic Scientist Supervisor in DNA Casework at the Missouri State Highway Patrol Crime Laboratory.
Meradeth Snow, Ph.D. is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Montana, specializing in degraded and ancient DNA, NGS, and forensic investigative genetic genealogy.
Pamela Marshall, Ph.D. is Associate Professor and Director of the Forensic Science and Law Program at Duquesne University and a member of Promega’s Forensic Leadership Alliance.