Do Workshop Papers at NeurIPS/ICML Actually Help Your PhD Application? Here's What Admissions Committees Actually See

TL;DR: You got accepted to the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Robustness in Foundation Models. Congrats — that's genuinely hard. 📖 Reading time: ~28 min What's in this article The Problem: You Have a Workshop Paper and You Don't Know What It's Worth First, Let's Be Honest About What a Workshop Paper Is (and Isn't) The Conference Tier Breakdown: Which Workshops Actually Move the Needle How to Actually List Workshop Papers on Your CV Without Overselling or Underselling The SOP Section: This Is Where Wo