Colleges ask for GenAI workshops and get slide decks about the history of neural networks. Students should leave a workshop with something running that they built, and a way to tell whether it works. This is the one-day plan I deliver, sized for 30 to 60 students with laptops.
Prerequisites, sent a week before
- Python installed and a code editor working; a ten-minute check script provided.
- A free account on an LLM provider, or keys supplied by the organisers for the day.
- One PDF each student cares about — notes, a manual, a rulebook.
Block 1 (90 min): what a language model is, by using one
Live calls to a model from Python. Temperature, context, a prompt that fails and why. Students make three calls and break one on purpose. No slides for the first hour.
Block 2 (90 min): retrieval over your own document
Chunk the PDF, embed, search, answer with the retrieved text in the prompt. Each student runs it on their own document. The room sees hallucination disappear when context arrives — and reappear when retrieval misses, which sets up the afternoon.
Block 3 (60 min): making it honest
Add keyword search alongside vectors, add a threshold that refuses on weak matches, add a citation to the page. The ideas from what a confidence gate is in a form students can implement in an hour.
Block 4 (60 min): evaluate and deploy
Each student writes ten questions with known answers and scores their system. Then a minimal deploy so the demo has a URL. The workshop ends with everyone sharing a link and a score, not a certificate.
Afterwards
- The complete code and a written version of every block.
- One stretch task with a two-week deadline: add reranking, or swap the embedding model, and report what changed.
- An office hour, remote, two weeks later for questions.
This syllabus is what I bring when a college books a full-day workshop; half-day and 90-minute versions exist. Details on the invite page.
About Pranjul Rathour
In a packed college auditorium
At a formal campus event
Pranjul Rathour
Presenting Annapurna on stage
Talking through the products he has shipped
Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-06.
Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:
- Email: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com
- Invite / talk menu: https://pranjulrathour.scult.in/invite
- Portfolio & blog: https://pranjulrathour.scult.in
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pranjul-rathour/
- X: https://x.com/PranjulRathourx
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pranjulrathour.in/
- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/pranjulrathour.bsky.social
- GitHub: https://github.com/Pranjulrathour
Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to
Top comments (0)