Average graduate salaries, according to the report, are £16 600, up 4.3
per cent on last year. Graduates with masters degrees are paid around £900
a year more, and those with PhDs an additional £2000. Students who have
gained degrees from sandwich courses, which include periods of work experience
as well as study, can expect £700 above the median.

A third of the firms in the survey say that they pay graduates working in
London more. Median salaries for new graduates who work in inner London are
starting at £18 000 and in outer London £17 375.

Earning a decent salary is one matter, how it progresses after you have taken
up your employment is just as important a concern for most of us. AGR members
say they are paying an average £22 000 to those whom they recruited five
years ago.

According to Tom Lovell of Reed, the employment agency, the AGR figures are
considerably higher than the national average because they represent only the
salaries paid by leading employers and not those of the smaller firms. A survey
by the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals’ Central Services Unit for
Higher Education, Manchester, agrees, reporting a median starting salary for new
graduates of £15 790. Starting salaries for information technologists are
£16 000 and those involved in scientific services also receive £16
000.

Many graduate scientists join Civil Service laboratories as scientific
officers on pay bands which stretch from around £12 000 to £22 000.
Now that each laboratory sets its own pay levels, considerable variations occur
in the salaries from one part of the Civil Service to another. For example, the
Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew pays scientific officers between £12 914
and £23 356, while the Ministry of Agriculture rewards them with salaries
in the range of £12 480 to £19 486. Senior scientific officers earn
up to £33 401 at the Department of Trade and Industry, however they can
only strive for £32 449 at the Department of Education and Employment.
Senior laboratory managers are in pay bands which can rise in some departments
to £51 516.

The government has acted to make going into school teaching more attractive.
Science and maths teachers now receive a training incentive of £2500 when
they start a postgraduate course leading to a certificate in education, and a
further £2500 when they begin teaching in a state school. Salaries, for
those with at least a second-class honours degree, start at £15 012 rising
after seven years to £22 401. Heads of Departments in schools earn up to
£29 040 and the highest paid head teachers with responsibility for the
largest secondary schools can aspire to £59 580.

Academic life usually starts after the completion of a PhD. Those lucky
enough to secure an award from a research council will have their tuition fees
paid and be given a living award. This varies from £5455 a year from the
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to £6865 a year given
by the Medical Research Council. Students in London receive up to £2257
extra, and those involved in research in collaboration with industrial concerns
can be paid much more. Postdoctoral researchers in the old universities are paid
on a scale beginning at £15 159 going up to £23 651. In the new
universities the scale is £15 205 to £23 199. Lecturers earn between
£16 655 and £29 048. Senior lecturers are paid up to £37 257
and the minimum professorial salary is £35 170.

If you want a career as a clinical scientist in the National Health Service,
the initial salary goes from £13 290 to £17 486 but promotion to
higher grades can lead (after 24 increments) to a pay of £34 065. Senior
clinical scientists can earn up to £54 539. Medical laboratory scientific
officers have a grade which rises to £9796 during training and then
transfers to one which reaches £17 486 after 10 years. Senior scientists,
with responsibility for entire laboratories, can earn up to £32 753. The
pay is definitely low but additionally these scientists receive payments for
emergency duties and being on-call.

Investment banks and management consultants are often considered to be the
best payers, and indeed new graduate trainees can earn in the region of
£24 000 plus bonuses with such organisations. ��è����Ƶs with a PhD who
enter investment analysis have recently been receiving offers of around
£35 000 a year. But graduates with the right personality for a career in
sales can earn up to £30 000 in their first year of employment if they
meet their sales targets—basic salaries in this area of work are often in
the region of £13 000. Taking employment with one of the companies which
sells personal financial products, and which only pays on commission, can be an
exceedingly risky business. I’ve met people who have managed to earn as little
as £85 for three months work for such a company. It contrasts sharply with
this year’s highest salary earned by a new graduate who was a trainee district
manager with Aldi Supermarkets. He received a package of £30 000 a year
plus free accommodation, a car, petrol and expenses . . . for working a 14-hour
day and a six-day week.

Last year I forecast that we had reached the peak of the recruitment cycle
(Appointments, 28 March, p 66).
Three per cent of last summer’s graduates were
still unemployed six months after graduating. There are now clear signs of a
reduction in recruitment. Oil companies, investment banks and retailers have
reduced their 1999 recruitment targets. Marks and Spencer, which was offering
new graduates in London a starting salary of £21 000 last summer, has
stopped recruiting graduates this year. Recruitment in information technology
and telecommunications continues to be strong. Reuters (London) is offering
salaries of £24 000 to this year’s trainees, though many organisations,
such as Demon Internet, London, which were expanding rapidly last year have
reduced their level of recruitment activity markedly this year.

Police forces employ scene-of-crime officers, who may be police officers or civilians. They collect the evidence and, when appropriate, send it to a forensic laboratory for analysis-just as you’ve seen on television. Sometimes, especially in cases of murder, forensic scientists or pathologists themselves must visit the scene of the crime.

Forensic scientists are independent. Their investigation may be requested by the police or the defence and their findings have to be unbiased. They must also be meticulous in their work and take clear and careful notes of everything they do, so that they can be cross-examined in a law court.

The Forensic Science Service (FSS) is an executive arm of the Home Office, and has six laboratories in England and Wales which employ around 1800 people, mostly scientists. They are based in London, Birmingham, Wetherby, Chorley, Huntingdon and Chepstow, and there is a special firearms unit in Manchester. Scotland has forensic laboratories in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow, which are each run separately by their local councils. Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic both have a laboratory of their own.

All FSS laboratories are organised in sections. Experts in firearms can identify, date and classify firearms and an array of other lethal weapons such as crossbows. By examining spent cartridges and bullets they can narrow down the possibilities of what kind of weapon was used and the distance from which it was fired. As well as aiding the 43 police forces, the FSS also undertakes work for Customs and Excise, the British Transport Police and the Crown Prosecution Service.

Serious crimes units uncover, with the use of chemicals and ultraviolet light, fingerprints invisible to the naked eye. And they are able to analyse electrostatically documents for any indentations left behind on paper, and to detect any alterations and substitutions in written text by spectral analysis. Analytical services are a major part of the work in forensic science. Techniques in everyday use include gas chromatography, high-performance liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. Infrared is used to examine and compare organic materials such as polymers and plastics. Scanning electron microscopy and microprobe analysis offer the opportunity to investigate minute fragments at high magnification and to determine their chemical composition.

The biggest advance in forensic techniques in recent years is DNA profiling. Only a very small sample of hair, tissue, blood, semen or other body fluid can be vital in identifying the suspect from whom it came. In fact, one cell is all that is required. The technique is also used to identify animals and the country from which samples of cannabis resin originated. The FSS claims that DNA profiling already offers a 40 per cent chance of identifying suspects and each year this increases as more samples are collected from suspects. New, faster and more economic analytical techniques are continually being researched and developed.

Julia Andersen joined what is now the London laboratory of the FSS as a higher scientific officer after completing her PhD in molecular biology at Imperial College, London. She is now a member of the team involved in the development of DNA profiling in routine casework.

“I spent three years working on a repeat process for DNA profiling as a member of a research and development group,” says Andersen. “I was then involved in transferring the technique into use for casework, and setting up an operational group to apply this technique.” She was trained to become a specialist reporting officer, learning how to write statements and give evidence in court. Normally it takes five years to reach this stage of a forensic science career. “I have now transferred to the Huntingdon laboratory where I manage a new DNA database unit,” she says.

Forensic laboratories recruit at two levels-assistant forensic scientists are required to have at least four GCSEs and an A level in science. Recruits who become forensic scientists and specialists are usually required to have a good honours degree. Most of them have a degree in chemistry or the life sciences. Several degree courses now include studies in forensic science such as those in chemistry, forensic and analytical science at the University of Strathclyde, in chemistry with pharmaceutical and forensic science at the University of Bradford, and that in applied science and forensic measurement at the University of Teesside.

A few students who already possess a degree in science can study forensic science at postgraduate level at King’s College London, at the University of Strathclyde and at Cranfield University. These courses include various forensic science techniques, such as incident scene investigation and search procedures, and the criminal justice system. The masters course in forensic engineering and science offered by Cranfield University covers the same ground but highlights engineering failure, explosions and ballistics. The Engineering and Physical Science Research Council provides four advanced course studentships at Strathclyde but most students on these postgraduate courses are expected to be self-financing.

Recruits undergo thorough training, most of which is “on the job”, but special training is provided on the use of the more complicated techniques and in the preparation of statements and giving evidence in court. Vacancies are usually advertised in ��è����Ƶ and in local newspapers. The Forensic Science Society is the professional body for all interested in the application of science to legal matters and has a membership of 2500 lawyers, police officers and forensic scientists.