As first author, extremely hard.

Essentially, to become a first author, you need to do these things:

1. have a good awareness of the state of the literature
2. find something worthwhile on top of all that literature
3. solidly show that your ideas work

More math may help you with 1, 2, 3. More programming may help you with 2, 3. Number 1 and 2 will trip beginners without people who know the field very well.

In my opinion, many good undergrad students have enough background to write a first author paper. However, u do need a supervisor to guide you. And u need to dedicate all your time to read papers, find topics and do researches.

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Without guidance? Extremely hard. I've had quite a lot of brilliant BSc students (or recent BSc grads) as interns who were able to get quite a lot of work done. The problem is, writing a paper is a lot more than simply doing the experiments. Primarily, I found that many students at that level struggle writing cohesive paragraphs, describing how the literature relates to the work that's being done, and clearly explaining the concepts, experiments etc. Then, you typically get weak rejects because the writing is not good or things are not clear.

Many people make the assumption that publishing is about ideas. This couldn't be more false. In fact, execution is often more important than the idea itself. A poorly executed good idea will get rejected. Well executed average idea will be accepted. Apart from these, as I said above, writing is one of the primary elements of the paper. I have seen quite a lot of papers where decent writing basically carried the entire paper, even though the idea was meh.

All in all, when you publish for 5+ years, you generally take many things for granted. But, if your are writing a paper for the first time without any guidance, you are looking to learn things the hard way (via rejections).

I published in the top journal in our field (computer systems) when I was a junior undergrad. For me, here are some key factors that I think you need to publish as an undergrad:

1. Find an advisor that is willing to invest his time to help you grind towards your paper. To be honest, thinking about the trouble I brought to my advisor, I would be reluctant to advise an undergrad in the future. You need to find someone who is willing to go through that.

2. Read a lot of papers in the desired field of study. Read a lot. I mean seriously, start right now. Most papers cite about 20~50 other papers. Probably less than half of the papers read for that project ended up being cited. This means you need to read up to 100 papers to write just one. My paper had around 50 references.

3. You need to have at least 1~2 years left until graduation. Just submitting and waiting for the results take about 6 months in CS. You'll probably get rejected at first. That's a year, after you actually wrote the damn thing. In order to build the muscle needed to conduct research, you probably want to do something like a UGRP one or two years earlier.

So yes, a first author paper at a proper journal/conference during undergrad is quite a feat. Not just because of the skills, but because of the amount of luck you need. But it's definitely worth it, especially if you want to get into a good graduate program.

There are some people who have published as first author in their bachelors. From what I've seen, they are extremely talented and/or with good connection to some key people in the field.

However, their work usually shows a clear lack in awareness of the research that has already been done on the problem that they are now working on. It is kind of obvious, but this is something that could slip through the cracks.

>o people publish as first authors during let say senior year? Like do I need to start reading ml theory and stuff now? I’m still taking calculus 1 as a fre

They get guidance. The question is not if you can write a paper as a BSC or not, it is whether your knowledge/commitment is worthy of some senior researchers time to guide you on how to navigate research/literature.

To publish you need an idea. Ideas are not created from vacuum. You need to develop it, or find someone who already has one. It simply takes time. Read a lot, understand what you read, and think how you can make it better.

They asked a senior professor in ML to do a summer project, and that professor gave them the idea and handheld them through it.

This is no way a hard requirement for PhD application, at least in the US. I didn’t have any accepted first author conference paper when I was admitted (senior year). I was still accepted to a few T20 PhD program. However, I did get 2 first-author papers published by the end of senior year, one was a workshop paper and one was a conference paper with Honorable Mention. You’ll need to have some research experience, do hard work and really impress your advisor. Hopefully, you will come up with some publishable ideas. I think the key for direct admit is having your advisor really vouch for you in their LORs. Getting a paper accepted is also a matter of luck, so having a professor saying that you produced high quality work is a good alternative.

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This is absolutely not a hard requirement to get into a PhD!