Health Science Reviews

By Lundi Peteni

After having been accepted for my honours, it came with great responsibility of having to adapt initially from a work environment to now academics, and I was quite excited because my previous job aligned very well with my honours program in forensic science. Though I was quite nervous at the same time. But fast forward to that, we started with our lab sessions of which I quite enjoyed because it allowed us to get some experience into lab work in a forensic setting and the lab demonstrators were very nice, warm, and were always happy to engage with us if we had any questions.

Firstly, we extracted DNA from hindlegs of forensic related blowflies within the Western Cape province and identified the species using barcoding database of which I found cool cause involved some cool stuff to look at and it changed my perspective of how previously I saw flies.

Secondly, we looked at the importance of chain of custody and its importance and got to have an understanding and experience through writing of contemporaneous note and generating a 212 affidavit of the experimental activities we did like blood spatter analysis, fingerprints, soil analysis and tread analysis. Thirdly we started with course work, namely medicolegal death investigation, toxicology, forensic trauma and forensic genetic, and the whole experience was quite eye opening, and I learned quite a lot in applying science to legal matters.

Also, what I noticed is how important my previous experience came into place and pretty much shaped my thinking and approach to my course work and thus allowing me to perform well and most importantly in my examination. Talking about exams that was a nerve-wracking period, the whole 2 weeks felt like a whole month, but hey here we are and I’m happy I survived.

Now I’m basically busy with my project looking at Traumatic brain injury fatalities in 2020, a very new experience given that I never did any medical related studies in my previous years but I’m willing to challenge myself and just learn as much as I can and it’s been interesting to be in a room with incredible people like my supervisors picking their brain on the topic, and also it’s quite exciting that this type of work could lead to positive change for communities all over the world specifically in the Western Cape.