DEV Community

Cover image for For placement cells: how industry GenAI sessions improve placements
PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

For placement cells: how industry GenAI sessions improve placements

#placementcell #tpo #genai #colleges

Placement officers book AI sessions because companies are asking for AI skills, then watch students give the same interview answers as before. The sessions that change outcomes are specific, hands-on and timed to the placement calendar. Having spoken to students and reviewed hundreds of their projects, here is what I would schedule if I ran a placement cell.

Sessions that move interviews

  • Portfolio review clinics — a practitioner reviews ten student projects live and says what a recruiter would think. Students rewrite their READMEs that night. See portfolio over certificates.
  • Mock technical interviews for AI roles — the questions in GenAI engineer interview questions, with feedback on the answers.
  • A one-day build workshop — students leave with a deployed project to talk about; see a one-day GenAI workshop syllabus.
  • Honest career talks — what GenAI roles actually involve, from someone doing one, including the unglamorous parts.

Timing across the year

  1. Start of the pre-final year: the build workshop, so projects exist by placement season.
  2. Mid-year: portfolio clinics and mock interviews.
  3. Two months before drives: a session on how to talk about projects — the story, the numbers, the trade-offs.
  4. Final year, post-placement: sessions for the students still searching, focused on remote and startup roles (see getting a remote GenAI role from a tier-2 city).

What to ask speakers for

Specific feedback, not motivation. A rubric students can use on their own projects. A follow-up office hour. And an honest read on which students are ready — practitioners notice, and some of them hire or refer.

Turning a visit into internships

Ask the speaker whether their company or network takes interns, and have three students' portfolios ready to share the same day. SCULT INDIA has taken on students I met through sessions and communities; most practitioners have a similar story. The visit is the introduction; the placement cell's follow-up is what converts it.

Placement cells can arrange any of these formats through the invite page; sessions for student communities are free.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour holding a trophy and a certificate of merit after a win
Trophy and certificate after a win

Pranjul Rathour presenting evaluation criteria — feasibility, innovation, practicality, problem solving — on a projector screen
Walking a room through evaluation criteria

Pranjul Rathour presenting BrandHive on a projector screen
Presenting BrandHive

Pranjul Rathour in a shirt and tie holding a microphone in front of a career-opportunities slide
A career session for students

Pranjul Rathour presenting with a microphone in front of a slide reading 'Now what's the conclusion?'
Presenting to a room

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:

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)