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

Before I went to NeurIPS, plenty of people warned me about what my first academic conference would be like. I didn’t think much of it at the time. This was academia, not a career fair. I assumed I wouldn’t be standing in line for an hour for a five-minute chat with someone who clearly didn’t want to be there, only to be told to scan a QR code and apply online.

I guess I had a naïve picture in my head of some 18th-century salon, where scholars in stuffy coats debated the truths of the world or whether the sun revolved around the moon. For the first day, that fantasy almost held up, minus the wigs. People were surprisingly bundled up for San Diego weather for some reason and the mood 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 went to NeurIPS as an undergrad about to graduate, with no plans to job hunt. 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. That made things socially awkward, but it also meant I wasn’t playing the same game as most of the people around me, and from the outside the game was easy to see.

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 look interested, then slowly steered the conversation toward whether there were open positions. The ones who weren’t doing that sat along the walls with Overleaf and VS Code open, trying to get some work done during business hours. Nobody was discussing Kant. They were optimizing throughput.

On some level, I respect the hustle. But it wasn’t what I expected from an academic conference. The quant firms didn’t help, with their stock tickers flashing like miniature Wall Street installations. Everyone was busy executing, and almost nobody seemed to be stopping to think.

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 started right away. About 90 percent of the people I talked to, senior researchers and PhD students alike, spent most of the conversation looking at my badge instead of my face. When I said I was an undergrad, I could watch the interest drain out of them.

I know this will change as my career goes on. With a PhD and a stronger institution behind my name, the same words will probably land differently. But the whole thing left a bit of a sour taste. It felt objectifying, and it seemed almost designed to give everyone impostor syndrome. I’m not sure who benefits when nearly everyone walks away a little dissatisfied.

I had a first-author paper already published and more under review, and people treated me like a curiosity. “Nice, good job, you started early.” Then the conversation was over. There was no room to talk about the actual ideas. Twitter was full of posts about being open to “anything” and “meeting new people,” but a lot of attendees seemed to want something closer to prestige, or to be seen near 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 trip wasn’t a total loss. The workshops were where I found what I came for.

The main conference often felt like an echo chamber, full of high-level talk about scaling and RL that everyone had already known for months. Workshops were different. They were small and focused, and the people there actually cared about the topic, because why else would they be in that room? Poster presenters and speakers were much more open to real discussion.

That’s where I finally found some of the scholarly energy I’d been looking for. The conversations went slower and deeper, and nobody was performing. I followed up with several people afterward, and a few of those could turn into real collaborations. None of that would have happened on the main stage.

NeurIPS wasn’t the philosophical retreat I’d imagined. It was closer to a battleground, where your name and your institution decide who pays attention to you. Still, it’s worth seeing the game clearly. I’d rather learn how it works now than find out years into the commitment.

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