Harry

Wondering how to attend an ML conference the right way? ahead of NeurIPS 2025 (30k attendees!) here are ten pro tips: 1. Your main goals: (i) meet people (ii) regain excitement about work (iii) learn things – in that order. 2. Make a list of papers you like and seek them out at poster sessions. Try to talk to the authors– you can learn much more from them than from a PDF. 3. Pick one workshop and one tutorial that sounds most interesting. Skip the rest. 4. Cold email people you want to meet but haven't. Check Twitter and the accepted papers list. PhD students are especially responsive. 5. Practice a concise pitch of unpublished research you're working on for "what are you interested in rn?". Focus on big unanswered questions and exciting new directions, *not* papers. 6. Skip the orals. Posters are a higher-bandwidth, more engaging, more invigorating. Orals are a good time to go for a walk or talk in the hallway. 7. for the love of god, do NOT work on other research in your hotel room. Save mental bandwidth for the conference. (This may seem obvious; you'd be surprised.) 8. Talk to people outside your area. There are many smart people working on niches <10 people understand. Learn about one or two that won't help your own work. 9. Attend one social each night. Don't overthink it or get caught up in status games. They're all fun. 10. Take breaks. You can't go to everything, and conferences consume more energy than a normal workweek. hope this helps, and sad i'm not attending neurips, have fun :)