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Is there such a thing as too many post-docs in a lab?


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I'm curious if people had any experience with having too many post-docs in a lab. I'm a 3rd year grad student, and I'm also my PI's first student. Until last summer, there was just me, another grad student and a post-doc. During last summer, my PI decided to bring in 4 more post-docs. Now, this summer, he's bringing in two more post-docs. Three of the post-docs have fellowships but the other four will be relying on his grants for now. 


I'm a bit confused about why he's accepting so many post-docs, and I guess he's not obliged to tell us or any of the lab members about it, but I don't know how I feel about the lab growing so fast. I know the size of the lab varies a lot between fields, but those numbers are pretty high in our field. With 7 post-docs and 2 grad students, our lab is literally the largest lab in our department. 


It'd be great to have lots of people with a wide variety of experiences and skills, but I'm also feeling a bit overwhelmed with the number of people that would be sharing the same lab space/instruments (especially during this time with COVID when we're not even allowed to operate at full capacity). I'm also wondering how he's going to keep up with everyone's work, and whether the "quality" of his current mentoring is going to go down or not. Maybe I'm just worrying over nothing, but I'm curious if anyone had been in a lab with LOTS of post-docs.

Edited by zhtmahtm
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