I receive many messages a week from students, and I try to answer all of them. The ones I can answer well share a structure. The ones I cannot — "Hi sir, please guide me" — are not lazy; nobody taught the student how to ask. This is that lesson.
The four-part message
- Context in two lines. Who you are, what you are building or deciding. "Second-year BCA at a college in Lucknow, building a notes search app for my department."
- What you tried. Concretely. "I chunked the PDFs at 1,000 characters and used a vector search; the right page rarely comes up."
- The specific question. One. "Should I try smaller chunks or add keyword search first?"
- The ask. "A two-line reply is enough" or "could I show you for ten minutes in office hours?"
Before and after
Before: "Sir I want to learn AI, which course should I do?" After: "I know Python basics and have built one Flask app. I want to build a RAG project this semester. Should I start with a course or with your beginner's guide and a small project?" The second gets an answer in a minute; the first gets nothing useful because there is nothing to answer.
What not to do
- "Can I call you?" as the first message. Earn the call with a good written question.
- Sending a repository link and "please check". Point to the file and the line.
- Asking five questions. You will get an answer to the easiest one.
- Disappearing after the answer. Reply with what happened; that is how you become someone a mentor invests in.
Why this matters beyond mentors
The same structure is a bug report, a message to a senior engineer, a cold email to a recruiter. Learning to ask well in Year 1 is a career skill disguised as etiquette. And it is the first thing I notice about a student who will go far — see what a good mentee does.
— Pranjul Rathour, GenAI Engineer from Kanpur, India. Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at any campus: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.