When Annie Zeng walked into her first research conference last May, she didn’t arrive with a lab group or a familiar cohort of classmates. She arrived alone, and she immediately felt like it.
“I honestly felt very nervous,” said Annie, a senior pursuing a double degree in mathematics and computer science. “I was going by my own so that was very intimidating for me.” The first day didn’t make it easier: “Everyone kind of knew each other and was talking to each other, and I didn’t really know anyone there, so it was extremely off-putting.”
Fortunately, “after I got to know at least one person in the conference, then introducing myself to other people just became a lot less off-putting,” Annie said.
That small shift from an outsider to participant demonstrates what more undergraduates are discovering—research conferences are not just for graduate students. This formal gathering where researchers present, discuss, exchange ideas, and build professional networks has become a new proving ground for undergrads who want their work taken seriously, and who want to meet the people influencing the field they are considering entering.
U of I has long hosted undergraduate research showcases, and they’ve grown into major campus fixtures. The Illinois Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR)’s annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, for example, has been held since 2008 and has grown to include over 800 students. That on-campus visibility has become a kind of runway, where students start by presenting to peers and mentors in familiar buildings, and eventually take the next step by presenting work to professional audiences, often out of state, and sometimes out of the country. For some, funding makes that ultimate step possible. The OUR offers a Conference Travel Grant of up to $400 to help subsidize costs for student presenting at professional conferences; additional support, such as a Research Support Grant offering up to $2,000, can help undergraduates build independent projects that later becomes conference presentations.
U of I undergraduates may not be overshadowing more advanced graduate students at research conferences anytime soon. But more of them are showing up, sometimes because of a suggestion from a mentor, sometimes because a travel grant made it feasible, sometimes because an email subject line caught their eye at the right moment.
And once they’re there, they’re doing what researchers do: presenting, listening, swapping contacts, and quietly realizing they belong in the room.
The hidden curriculum that is now taught earlier
Across disciplines, whether computer science, global studies, or astronomy, undergraduate students describe conferences as more than travel and presentations. They seem to be teaching a “hidden curriculum” that undergraduates don’t always get in class, but are essential for their growth and development academically and personally, such as introducing yourself to strangers who already know each other, or condensing months of research into minutes, or how to find the right rooms and the right people.
Political science professor Avital Livny, who has long been committed to student engagement and research development, said that conferences do something academic writing rarely does, which is that they create real-time feedback loops. “When we write about our work… the communication typically only flows in one direction — we rarely hear back from other scholars,” Livny said. “At a conference, we get to have much more dynamic, two-way conversations — we talk about our work and hear back directly from others. As a result, our work gets better and we also improve our ability to describe what we are doing and why it matters.”
That exchange can sharpen both the project and the person presenting it. “The research benefits, of course, but so does the researcher in learning how to express themselves and respond effectively to constructive criticism.” Livny said, an especially important skill for young researchers, including undergraduates. And she urged students to treat discomfort as part of the process: “Do not expect that things will go perfectly, exactly as you expect,” she said. “Be open to different reactions… including ones that challenge your current approach.”
At the same time, she added, undergraduates shouldn’t mistake critique for a cue to disappear: “Don’t be afraid to defend your contribution, respectfully — you are offering a fresh perspective that has the potential to really shake things up.”
“You get to share what you’ve been working on”
For students like Kami Parker, conferences can become the center of gravity for everything that comes next.
Kami, a senior double majoring in Spanish and global studies with a minor in Latin American studies, attended and presented at her first conference in November 2024. Since then, she said, she has “attended and presented at more than five other conferences as well.” The draw is simple, Kami explained: “You get to share what you've been working on with experts and people who understand and care about your field of study.”
Kami started research in Hispanic linguistics during her sophomore year in fall 2023 and wanted a place where her work could be presented. Similar to Annie, she also didn’t walk into the conference culture already knowing the rules. “At the time I didn't know of anyone else attending conferences,” she said, so she leaned on her graduate research mentor Luis Gaytan to help her prepare for the conference and apply for the undergraduate Conference Travel Grant.
What began as one presentation became an exploration of academia. Kami said being a research assistant and presenting at conferences inspired her to pursue the Distinguished Undergraduate Researcher Certificate awarded by the Office of Undergraduate Research, as well as to create her own study, for which she received the Research Support Grant. “These conferences really helped introduce me to the world of academia,” Kami said, “and I am now applying to master's and PhD programs to continue researching and pursuing academia.”
In STEM, conferences can be the publication
Conferences were more than just a venue to talk about research for Annie, but also part of how research becomes “real” in computer science.
“A lot of times when you do computer science research, you instead of… sending it to publish in a journal, you send it to be published in a conference,” she said. “And that's how publication in CS works.”
In her case, a paper submission turned into an acceptance, then a requirement. “So I sent my paper to the conference to get it published. They accepted it, which also meant I had to go and present.”
She did. And she returned.
Annie said she attended one conference this May to present her research and another in September “more because of networking.” She’s also the kind of student who treats opportunity-hunting like a habit. “I'm someone who looks at all the emails I receive,” she said.
That’s how she found an international event in Europe, the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in September, an annual networking conference for math and computer science, after the department circulated it to undergraduates. “The CS department sent out an email to our undergrads encouraging us to apply,” she said. “So I looked at it and thought that maybe it was a good opportunity, so I applied.”
At the same time, she’s careful about what she applies to. Department-wide announcements can be noisy. “It doesn't always mean it's a good fit for every undergraduate,” she said. “I just thought that this one would be a good fit.”
Bigger rooms, bigger conversations
If the undergraduate research symposium is the runway, Yash Ejjagiri is a perfect example of what takeoff looks like.
Yash graduated this past May with degrees in computer science and astronomy and minors in physics and math. He’s currently working full time as a post-baccalaureate research assistant at U of I, a role he describes as a bridge between undergrad and graduate school. “They're essentially like research positions… that you do for a couple years before applying to grad school just to get more experience,” he said.
His first presentation wasn’t at a hotel conference center. It was a U of I research symposium connected to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). “I was a SPIN intern my junior summer,” he said, referring to NCSA’s Students Pushing Innovation program, which pairs undergraduates with research mentors. “At the end of that program they had like a symposium where everyone presented whatever their works were.”
It wasn’t “a full conference,” Yash said, but it taught him what presenting feels like when your audience isn’t just your research group. And by the following summer, he was traveling. One major stop was a conference in Stanford called Decoding the Universe in June 2025, an event that brings together researchers across astrophysics, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AL/ML), and data science. Yash found it by “looking up different opportunities through Slack,” submitted an abstract about the research he did, and got accepted, ultimately going alongside graduate students.
He remembers the intimidation factor clearly. “The Stanford one was intimidating at first because all of the people there were like grad students usually,” he said, “so they have a lot of expertise.”
His format was a lightning talk: “I have like a poster up on the slide, and then we'd go up and talk about it for a minute. I was definitely intimidated at first, but I think as I started speaking, I got a lot more comfortable… and just less intimidated and less scared of like talking to these really, really smart people.”
The part he liked best, though, wasn’t necessarily the stage, but was what came after. “I also prefer more like one-on-one conversations,” Yash said. Poster sessions made that easier: “My poster was there and I could like look at the poster and just… I have my whole poster blurb memorized.”
From there, Yash attended additional conferences, including one called Cosmic Cartography with Roman in Baltimore in July 2025, hosted at the Space Telescope Science Institute. He also mentioned a Dark Energy Science Collaboration meeting, one that, notably, U of I hosted in July 2025.
“It actually helped me figure out which schools I want to apply to for PhD,” Yash said, because “those professors or their grad students were there presenting their work… and I got a chance to talk to them about the work as well.”
He summarized the value important for his development. “It was really good to grow my network, and just meet people, learn about different types of research going on in the field, and just build connections that might be useful in the future whenever applying to jobs or graduate programs.”
