Under Pressure

I was recently aimlessly browsing Wikipedia and came upon the entry for E.J. Corey. In case you’re unfamiliar with Corey, he is a professor at Harvard and probably the most well-known living organic chemist, largely because his lab has completed many syntheses of complex natural products and has developed a number of widely-used reactions. But there’s also some notoriety associated with his name, and in the insular world of academic chemistry, it’s difficult to remain ignorant of the gossip surrounding professors as famous as Corey. In 1998, a graduate student in the Corey lab named Jason Altom committed suicide, famously blaming Corey in one of the notes he left. I don't want to focus on the suicide here, though, since it's a far-removed event that I have no insight on.

I was reading about Altom’s suicide and came across this New York Times Magazine article, which I think does a stellar job of painting a portrait of the pressures that chemistry graduate students at top institutions feel. I would highly recommend reading it if you are thinking about a graduate program in chemistry. I want to excerpt one passage from the article that I found particularly illustrative:

“In some labs, [the graduate students] even resorted to little tricks to impress the lab chief. The extra jacket on a hook in the lab, so it looked as if you were around even if you'd gone home. Having someone open your lab door and turn on the lights in the morning, so it looked as if you were already in. Putting a stirrer -- a magnetic object that stirs liquids together -- in a flask, so it would look as if you had a reaction going on. One student told me he never left a note to a fellow student open on the desk, because it might suggest you weren't around; notes were folded over, with an X on top, to indicate there was a message within.”

I couldn’t believe this passage when I first read it. Worrying about whether someone will look for my jacket if I’m not at my desk? Wasting time and mental energy setting up a fake experiment in case someone comes by? These things would never have occurred to me, and, I believe, ought to serve as an indictment of the pressures that some grad students are under to spend all of their time in lab. I would be shocked to find out that anyone in my lab--or even in most of the labs in the chemistry department at Berkeley--was resorting to faking long hours to impress a research adviser. But I say “most” because the working environment of labs varies widely, and is often worse in small labs where it’s easier for advisers to keep tabs on their students. When I visited The Scripps Research Institute, one of the graduate students I met complained incessantly about her adviser: this adviser, a relatively young faculty member with a lab of about ten people, would check in on his students’ progress several times a day and even go through their lab notebooks when they weren’t around to check up on their productivity. In labs like these, I can imagine why students would feel that they needed to resort to the types of tricks described in the article to gain favor with a professor. I would never join a lab that had this type of culture. Most of the labs at Berkeley aren’t like this, I suspect, in part because between teaching obligations and larger lab sizes, professors at Berkeley are too busy to spend their time taking attendance.

But while overbearing advisers are often a problem, each situation is unique. The pressure that graduate students feel to work long hours is often self-generated--if I just put in an extra hour every day, I'll be able to publish an extra paper before I graduate--or is often a product of pressure applied by other students in the lab--peers commenting that a student always gets in late or chats with labmates too much. This is yet another reason to thoroughly do your homework before joining a lab.