PSYCHWEEK 2020: Ms Stephanie from HTBSC

What is forensic psychology? Well, last Thursday, Ms Stephanie, a senior psychologist from HSTBC’s Crime Investigation and Forensic Branch, came to talk to us about what forensic psychology is, what her job entails and career opportunities under the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). There were many interesting takeaways from this talk and helped us answered a lot of questions about working in the governmental branches as a psychologist.

Firstly, Ms Stephanie explained to us that forensic psychology is the application of psychology in the legal field and does not involve thee forensic science work such as examining the crime scene that popular media usually portrays. Forensic psychologists mainly deal with the assessment and rehabilitation of individuals in the legal system such as advising if people are mentally fit to stand trial. They can be found within police departments, prisons, governmental and private sectors, to work with offenders, victims and even policy makers that can make large scale changes to the law. I had no idea that there were so many career paths for a forensic psychologist to take, and this widened my eyes to the various branches I could try reaching out to in the future.

Ms Stephanie also spoke to us about what she usually worked with under the HSTBC’s Crime Investigation and Forensic Branch: Crime profiling, deception detection, and cyberstalking. Crime profiling is probably the concept most people think of when talking about forensic psychology, and it is about examining the motivations of offenders who commit the crime. It entails judging the offender and determining if they were sane when committing the crime, and what could have spurred it on.

Deception detection is about identifying suspicious individuals and stopping them from committing any crimes and it is something that many guards have to utilise at all times to ensure the safety and security of the community. While it isn’t as popular as crime profiling, I found it to be a really essential idea to Singapore which deals with terrorist threats quickly and harshly. Finally, Ms Stephanie talked about the growth of cyberstalking, and that they have to weigh out if they need to intervene with the cyberstalker (whether they will eventually pose a threat to their target). Overall, she gave us a really good insight into some of the work to expect if we wanted to join the branch and the importance of their work to our community.

Ms Stephanie also briefly talked to us about the various branches of the HSTBC department such as the resilience, safety and security psychology branch or the operations and corporate support branch. I think she mentioned that all the branches do have annual internship opportunities but that it is a very competitive process as we have to compete with other university students in Singapore as well. The next internship cycle for her own branch would likely occur from May to August 2021, and that students should write in early if we are keen to apply. I highly recommend year 2 or 3 students who have previous research experience to try out for their internship as they would put that experience into consideration as part of the application process as well.

Overall, while this was a lengthy talk, I wasn’t bored at all and learnt a lot from Ms Stephanie’s sharing about forensic psychology and about the HSTBC’s Crime Investigation and Forensic Branch specifically. We found out more about potential internships and job career opportunity that is really helpful for people interested in psychology to pursue. Overall, it was a really fun sharing and I hope that more people would join us in the future for other talks such as this!