Lucy W. Pickett attended high school in Beverly and later entered Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1921 and graduated in 1925.

[2] Lucy planned on majoring in Latin but changed her mind to work in the sciences, having an attraction to chemistry.

During her 1932–1933 leave she worked with the famous X-ray crystallographer and Nobel laureate Sir William Bragg at the Royal Institution, London.

In 1939, on an Educational Foundation Fellowship she worked with Victor Henri at University of Liège, Belgium, and with George Kistiakowsky at Harvard.

As much as Lucy would have liked to have continued her work in X-ray crystallography, she returned to Mount Holyoke College to join in an active team of researchers, including Emma Perry Carr and Mary Sherrill, who were investigating molecular structures through spectroscopy.