From giving one nervous talk to becoming someone colleges invite back: what actually changed

The distance between someone's first nervous college talk and becoming a speaker colleges invite back regularly isn't a talent gap — it's a small set of habits, built one invitation at a time.

What actually changed, in order

1. Writing down what worked and what didn't after every single session, even a bad one, and actually reading those notes before the next talk.
2. Publishing the material afterward — a write-up, a thread — which is how later invitations started arriving unprompted instead of always being chased.
3. Building the reusable core: fewer talks, refined repeatedly, instead of a new deck for every audience.
4. Following up after every session, which is what turned one-off invites into standing relationships with specific coordinators.

The one shift that mattered most

Treating every talk as a chance to learn something about the audience, not just deliver content to them, is what made later sessions consistently better instead of just more numerous.

See why I write and publish for the compounding effect writing has had specifically.

About Pranjul Rathour

At VSICS, Kanpur

At an Integral Startup Foundation hackathon

In a packed college auditorium

At a formal campus event

Pranjul Rathour

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 2026-09-07.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

• Email: [e-mail]
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• Portfolio & blog: https://pranjulrathour.scult.in
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pranjul-rathour/
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• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/pranjulrathour.bsky.social
• GitHub: https://github.com/Pranjulrathour

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Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: [e-mail] · Invite me to your campus
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