When Fung Lam, a first-year graduate student in chemistry, died last year--in what Harvard spokesperson Alex Huppe says the medical examiner has ruled a suicide--the chemistry department did not take a critical look at advising because Lam had been in the program for only one semester.

Altom was a department student-veteran, and he explicitly criticized the department in his suicide note.

Anderson says he has been meeting withexperts in graduate education, psychology andpsychiatry, as well as University Health ServicesDirector David S. Rosenthal '59, to try anddetermine the best approach to improve thegraduate student experience.

"It's time to change the way we view graduateeducation," Anderson says, noting the "importanttransition" between undergraduate life, marked bybooks, lectures and exams, and graduate work, alonely search for answers in the library or thelaboratory.

Performing intense lab research as a graduatestudent is a "very exciting period, but also aperiod of difficulty," Anderson says. "There's ahuge amount of frustration--doing things that havenever been done before. We've all gone throughit."

Anderson says departments need to "broaden astudent's emotional base," arguing thatfriend-ships, exercise and multiple interests areessential to successful scholarship.

"A broad emotional base leads to the finestresearch," Anderson says.

Departments should also "explicitly encouragepeople to seek advice--to make it literally partof the curriculum," Anderson says.

Opening the channels of communication within adepartment--guaranteeing that a student will havemore than one professor with whom to discuss workor career goals--is also a new priority, Andersonsays.

According to Rebecca J. Jackman and MichaelGrogan, graduate students in chemistry and closefriends of Altom, change in their department is"long overdue."

"A long-standing lack of communication betweenstudents and faculty," Jackman and Grogan agree,is the most important problem facing the graduateprogram.

Just how to solve to this problem depends onwhom you ask.

Improving "The Best"

Grogan says that the student-advisorrelationship itself should not necessarily change,but a department should ensure students receivesupplementary guidance.

As the chemistry program now stands, mostgraduate students engage in full-time research asearly as their second year. Apart from interactionwith a group leader, a faculty member who may havemore than 20 students to supervise, there is noformal departmental evaluation--no indication ofhow one is progressing--until a month before astudent defends the thesis in front of acommittee.

The result: students can feel that "they'redoing chemistry in a vacuum," Grogan says. Thethesis committee "is really a rubber stamp," afrustrating process for those interested inconstructive direction for their work.