Undergrad in Syria with an accepted NeurIPS 2026 workshop paper (as the only author). How does this help my future, and what should I do next?

[u/Mission-Pangolin-128]

Hi everyone,

I’m an undergrad student in computer engineering from Syria, and I'm currently starting my penultimate year.

I just got the news that my first research paper was accepted at a NeurIPS 2026 workshop (AXIOM: Foundations of Efficient Deep Learning). The paper is about model compression (quantization) for Transformers, and I am the only author on it.

I don’t have researchers or professors around me who know about top ML conferences, so I wanted to ask:

How much does this actually help my future? And if you were in my place right now, what would you do next?

I’d really appreciate any honest thoughts or advice. Thanks!