Coordinators ask what I can speak about, so here is the menu as it stands, with what each session is for. Every talk is built from things I have shipped, won or lost, and every workshop ends with students running something they built. All of these can be on-site anywhere in India or remote.
Talks (40–60 minutes)
- From college hackathons to production AI — the roadmap I gave 100+ first-years at the VSICS induction, extended: Year 1 foundations, Year 2 hackathons and internships, Year 3 placements or a startup. For inductions and fests.
- What I learned winning three hackathons and losing one — Changethon at IIT Roorkee, Product Genesis at CSJMU, BYTEBATTLE, and STROT; the pitch, the demo, the team. For hackathon kick-offs.
- Production RAG that refuses to hallucinate — hybrid retrieval, reranking, confidence gates and citations, from building RAG.NextUpgrad. For CS and AI batches.
- Shipping AI as a small team — five production AI apps in a year, and what a 14-member student-led team gets right and wrong. For entrepreneurship cells.
- AI for everyone else — an honest AI literacy session for non-CS departments; see an AI awareness session for non-CS students.
Workshops (90 minutes to a full day)
- Build a RAG app from scratch — the one-day GenAI workshop syllabus; 90-minute and half-day versions available.
- Fine-tune a small model on a free GPU — QLoRA end to end with an honest base-versus-tuned evaluation, based on FineTune Studio.
- Ship it — FastAPI, Next.js, Docker, logs and a deploy, in one afternoon.
Mentoring and judging
- Mentorship sessions built around students' own projects and decisions.
- Hackathon judging with a published rubric and written feedback for every team, and hackathon mentoring before or during events.
- Portfolio and mock-interview clinics for placement cells.
Logistics
Sessions for student communities are free; on-site visits ask for travel. I need the students' year and prior knowledge a week ahead, and a tested projector on the day. Everything else — past sessions, photographs, the invitation checklist — is on the campus invite page, and the email is pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
— Pranjul Rathour, GenAI Engineer from Kanpur, India. Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at any campus: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
