Why I'm glad I picked Crime & Investigative Studies at ARU

As a Crime and Investigative Studies student my main motivation in life is to be a part of the everlasting fight with crime. But my course has fundamental differences from courses such as Criminology or Policing and ARU has designed it in a very unique way.

If you look for similar courses in the UK, you won’t find anything quite like what ARU offers here. And that is primarily one of the reasons that I decided to study in ARU.

So, what is it that I actually love about my course? It’s the fact that we have practical sessions almost every week. I love theory, but studying it all the time without applying it into practice would definitely demotivate me.

As you can guess, crime and investigation is complex and contains numerous aspects. My favourite disciplines so far are Physical Criminalistics and Forensic Photography. Even though I’m more interested in the actual investigation of a crime than crime scene investigation, I do like studying the disciplines.

Forensic Photography is amazing because it is crucial for an investigation. It illustrates the crime scene in a way that allows a judge or the jury to view it as if they are actually there. That is imperative because some crimes reach the court after months or even years, so the jury needs to be able to visualise the crime scene just as it was on the day the crime was discovered. This ARU module includes crime scene photography, injury photography, photography of the deceased and more. This can be really difficult at times, as well as exciting.

Meanwhile, Physical Criminalistics is directly related to crime scene investigation. It is about understanding the different types of physical evidence, such as glass, footwear marks and tyre marks, and puts emphasis on their forensic examination.

This is where having weekly practical sessions helps us. Not only are we able to analyse evidence, but we get to work in teams, make new friends and foster our teamwork skills, which is essential for this job.

It truly is a wonderful experience and I encourage everyone who’s interested in this course to come to an Open Day or chat to students who are studying this course.