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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

How to ask a mentor for help (so you actually get it)

#mentoring #students #communication #career

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

  1. 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."
  2. What you tried. Concretely. "I chunked the PDFs at 1,000 characters and used a vector search; the right page rarely comes up."
  3. The specific question. One. "Should I try smaller chunks or add keyword search first?"
  4. 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.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour seated in a black jacket and white turtleneck with an event lanyard
Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour presenting KrishGyan — farming advice in your voice and language — in front of a projector screen
Presenting KrishGyan

Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer from Kanpur, in a white turtleneck and black jacket, looking to the side
Pranjul Rathour — GenAI engineer, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour speaking into a microphone on stage at a MeetKats event
Speaking at a MeetKats event

Pranjul Rathour holding a microphone while answering a question during a session
Taking questions during a session

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

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