Postdocs: Why Does Every Professor Have One?

If you land a spot in a research program, there's a good chance your day-to-day mentor won't be the professor who you emailed to get the position. Rather, it would be a postdoc.

Postdocs occupy an interesting in-between status in a lab. They've already proven they can complete independent research (that's what a PhD demonstrates), but they're still working under a PI's grant funding and lab, essentially auditioning for full independence.

Many postdocs are also actively applying for their own small grants during this period, both to fund their specific project and to build the kind of independent funding history that hiring committees look for later. This is also exactly why so many high schoolers get paired with a postdoc or graduate student instead of the PI directly. This is mainly because postdocs and grad students are usually the ones actually at the bench every single day, running the experiments, which often makes them the most available mentors in the entire lab. PIs, by comparison, often spend the bulk of their time writing grants, managing the lab, and traveling, meaning they may only check in on a project occasionally.

So if your program coordinator says you'll be working with "Dr. So-and-so's postdoc," that's completely normal, and is actually the best-case scenario for learning techniques since postdocs remember more recently what it's like to be new to a specific method than a professor who hasn't personally run that protocol in years.

Postdocs aren't limited to universities, either. Companies in biotech, pharma, and tech also hire industry postdocs, often with better pay and more defined hours than the academic version, though typically with less flexibility to publish or pursue side projects.

It’s also worth noting that not every PhD graduate who stays in research becomes a postdoc-then-professor. In fact, there’s a rising trend of PhD graduates becoming staff scientists, which is a permanent, non-faculty research role that skips the pressure of eventually running an independent lab while still doing hands-on science full time. It's a path more students are considering as awareness grows that a faculty position isn't the only "successful" outcome of a science PhD.