Anderson says that what graduate students do is largely shaped by their own goals and aspirations. The image of the advisor standing over them with a whip, he says, is misconceived.

"There is a conception that faculty are driving students and setting the pace. A vast amount of the horsepower and directions emanates from the students, and it's very important to recognize that," he says.

Students also say chemistry lab work's all-or-nothing pace puts pressure on grad students to produce. When students get close to a break-through, they feel extra pressure to stay the extra hours or the extra nights or weekends to get that breakthrough.

"The nature of science is that there is no guarantee. If you are in another department, you can fake it. There are doable problems in other fields," Finkelstein says. "But in chemistry you might have a stretch of nine months where nothing works."

But for Lawrence, who has been in the department for seven years, who served with Jason Altom in the Corey lab and who knows what it's like to have that stretch where nothing works, the only way that things can improve is through the attitude of the individual graduate students.

"It has definitely changed for the better," he says. "Graduate students have said 'This is crazy, it's not rational, let's not do this to ourselves.'"