Forensic Pathologist Career

“The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others,” quoted by Albert Schweitzer, a French-German theologian, organist, philosopher, and physician. Nearly everyone on this planet has the desire to help others during times of need. There are hundreds of ways to help others and hundreds of people who need helping. I've always wanted to help others with their losses through Forensic Pathology. I was able to job-shadow the Peoria County coroner and one of the forensic pathologists that works with the coroner on December 9, 2016. This paper will include the details of my experience job-shadowing the coroner, my experience job-shadowing the forensic pathologist, what the future holds for both careers, what
I really like that with being a forensic pathologist, one doesn’t have to work alone in the autopsy room. There is always an assistant that will help and there can even be another forensic pathologist that helps with the autopsies. With the forensic pathologist career, I’ve always found autopsies to be fascinating and would very much like performing autopsies to help discover the last few minutes of someone’s life story. With being a coroner, I like that it gives one the ability to help families and talk with them through the loss of their loved ones. As a coroner, I would dislike the large amount of stress that comes along with the job. Families can cause lots of pressure to be put on the coroner, police officers and deputies can stress the coroner about certain cases, and the State Department and District Attorney breathing down the neck of a coroner can cause lots of stress. I personally don’t think that there is too much stress on a forensic pathologist other than that they have to work for multiple different coroner’s offices and not mix up any cases. However, since forensic pathologists are usually self-employed they can set their prices higher and get the money the feel they deserve for having to go through this stress. I don’t like that forensic pathologists are self-employed for the fact that they have lots of expenses that have to be paid
I would need to have a medical education in anatomy and physiology to help determine what type of death occurred. I would need basic writing and reading skills to write and read reports. Lastly, I would need math skills in statistics to be able to determine a common type of death in different locations, reading graphs and charts that could be made to better understand crime scenes, and simple calculations for expenses that will be needed during a term. All math and English classes taken in high school would help me get prepared for this job. The software applications class taken my freshman year in high school would prepare me for this job and the anatomy and physiology class that I plan to take my senior year would help to prepare me for this career. For this career, I would need to be able to work with others and be able to converse and agree on problems, changes, results, and solutions to be successful in this career. Working in groups for school projects would provide the knowledge I would need for this part of the career. I would need to have patience, honesty, integrity, and the ability to remove myself from relations to the deceased to be successful. These skills would come from experience during this