Reid's job before CM? I've always imagined him as a PhD candidate at the universities he went to. Perhaps he TA'd a bit here and there at the start of his grad school life but found out he didn't like being in front of people so he stopped. Although I can imagine him as a marker for his professors he's studying under. When I was in uni, I always see grad students wandering around campus whose entire life is at the university they were studying at and I've always imagined Reid in that life :P
Oh yeah, that’s gotta be Reid’s backstory: University until the FBI Academy and the BAU. Someone once tried this whole convoluted FBI thing and actually tried to argue it wasn’t logical Reid went straight from school to the BAU. She was really adamant about it while everyone else was all WTF are you smoking.
What I really wonder is how Reid got in. I can envision two different backstories that I think are both plausible:
1. Reid - who’s so into death and statistics - fanboy intro’d himself and bugged the shit out of Gideon when the older man came to his university for a lecture. Reid’s like the only person who wouldn’t notice Gideon’s initial attempts to give him the brush off.
~ or ~
2. Somehow, Gideon got ahold of one of Reid’s papers and sought Reid out. Gideon just came across a published paper, or someone gave it to him. I think it’s plausible one of Gideon’s CIA or NSA friends might have forwarded some of Reid’s work. As a brilliant mathematician, Reid would have been on the NSA’s radar from a young age.