How exactly one goes about networking in conferences? [D]

Reddit r/MachineLearning / 4/21/2026

💬 OpinionIdeas & Deep AnalysisTools & Practical Usage

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Key Points

The post asks how to maximize networking value at conferences like ICLR, especially for a PhD student seeking industry internships.
It describes an approach of visiting related posters, discussing papers and asking questions, then following up afterward via email to ask about internship opportunities.
It questions whether this post-conference cold-email follow-up is the right strategy or whether it makes little difference compared with emailing cold.
It also asks how overwhelmed industry and research authors might be by such outreach requests, and whether short in-person conversations meaningfully improve response rates.
Overall, the article is seeking practical guidance on effective conference networking and follow-up etiquette.

So ICLR is coming and apparently the biggest value one can get from these conferences is to network.

Let's take my example: I'm a PhD student looking for industry internships. Say I have located about 15-20 posters regarding topics adjacent or directly related to my area of research, some of which are by authors from industry labs.

I go to the poster, ask the authors about their paper, discuss a bit, perhaps ask some insightful questions and mention that I work in similar things, and then after the conference I email them asking if they have internships? Is this how I should be extracting the networking value of it?

Also, how overwhelmed are authors with these kind of requests? Seems like cold emailing vs this doesn't make that much of a difference, besides the fact that they might remember me from the conversation we had during 15 minutes during their poster session.

submitted by /u/howtorewriteaname
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