Reflection: My Experience at NeurIPS 2025 as an Undergrad Not Looking for a Job

Before I stepped into NeurIPS, I received plenty of warnings about what my first academic conference would be like. At the time, I did not think much of it. After all, this was academia, not a career fair. I assumed I would not be standing in line for an hour just to have a five-minute conversation with someone who clearly did not want to be there, only to be told to scan a QR code and apply online.

I guess I had this naïve vision in my head, some kind of scholarly, 18th-century salon where people in stuffy coats debated the nature of truth or whether the sun revolved around the moon. And for the first day, that fantasy almost held up, minus the wigs. People were surprisingly bundled up for San Diego weather, and the atmosphere felt calm, almost contemplative.

Then I opened Twitter and realized I had missed the other half of the venue.

Source: Sergei Iakhnin on X

Everyone is on The Grind

For context, I attended NeurIPS as an undergrad about to graduate, with no immediate intention of job hunting. My gap semester and summer were already booked with a research position in Tübingen, and after graduating in December I would technically be an independent researcher until grad school decisions came through. This put me in an awkward position socially, but it also gave me a rare vantage point. I was not playing the same game as most people around me.

That distance made the conference feel strangely transparent.

There were a lot of people. I had been warned about the crowds, and I have been to packed events before, but nothing quite like this. The density was not just physical. It was social, professional, and relentlessly transactional. Quality conversation gave way to high-volume lead generation. Exchange LinkedIn. Scan the QR code. Grab the merch. Move on.

People asked questions to perform interest, slowly steering the conversation toward whether there were open positions. If they were not doing that, they were sitting along the walls with Overleaf and VSCode open, trying to squeeze in productivity during the business day. Nobody was discussing Kant. They were optimizing throughput.

On some level, I respect the hustle. But it was not what I expected from an academic conference. The quant firms certainly did not help, with their stock tickers flashing like miniature Wall Street installations. The dominant energy was execution, not reflection.

The Credential Filter

When everyone is searching for their next opportunity, heuristics become the dominant currency. School. Lab. Advisor. Company affiliation. You cannot bypass the filter.

The badge stare was immediate. Roughly 90 percent of the people I spoke to, from senior researchers to PhD students, spent most of the conversation looking at my badge instead of my face. When I said I was an undergrad, I could see interest visibly drain away.

I know this will change as my career progresses. After Germany, after a PhD, after stronger institutional backing, the same words will likely land differently. But the dynamic itself left a sour taste. It felt objectifying, and worse, actively engineered to cultivate impostor syndrome. I am not sure who benefits from an environment where nearly everyone walks away slightly dissatisfied.

As an undergrad with a first-author paper already published and others under review, I was treated like a curiosity. “Nice, good job, you started early.” Then the conversation ended. There was no space to talk about ideas, assumptions, or mechanisms. Despite the flood of tweets about being open to “anything” and “meeting new people,” what many attendees actually seemed to want was validation, prestige, or proximity to a bigger name.

Academia, it turns out, is not immune to industry logic.

It did not help that I work in AI Safety. In practice, that often translates to “not reinforcement learning,” which was clearly the big gravitational center of the conference. Conversations followed a predictable decay: What school? Who is your advisor? What do you work on? At each step, more people disengaged. An undergrad, not from a famous lab, doing AI Safety instead of RL was simply not a high-value node.

Not to say everyone behaved this way. But enough did that the pattern became impossible to ignore.

The Real Signal Hides in the Niche

The experience was not a total loss. The workshops were where the signal lived.

The main conference often felt like an echo chamber, with high-level discussions about scaling and RL that everyone already knew for months. Workshops were different. They were smaller, narrower, and intellectually honest. Poster presenters and speakers were far more open to real discussion because the topic itself acted as a filter. If you were there, you cared.

That was where I finally found more of the scholarly energy I had been looking for. Conversations were slower, deeper, and less performative. I actually followed up with several people afterward, and there is real potential for future collaboration. None of that would have happened on the main stage.

In the end, NeurIPS was not the philosophical retreat I had imagined. It was closer to a battleground where names, institutions, and metrics determine who gets attention. Still, there is value in seeing the game clearly. Knowing the terrain early is far better than discovering it years into the commitment.

At the very least, I now know what kind of fight I am choosing.