Recently I was in a large research conference mostly targeted at undergraduates, so there were people from many universities recruiting for summer programs, grad schools and academic societies.
It seemed like an excellent opportunity to make myself known, but I didn't have much success when interacting with them.
Most of the time I could have easily found on the internet all the information they gave me. When I tried to dig a little deeper (i.e. how much research experience do students accepted to your school have?) I got some very generic responses (i.e. We look at the whole package so it varies). I also attempted to talk a bit about my research interests in general to schools that seemed a good match, but that also went nowhere.
However, universities wouldn't spend so many resources if they didn't expect to gain something at these events, so I imagine I'm going about this the wrong way.
What should I speak about with university recruiters?