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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Side project ideas that actually teach production skills, not just model-calling

#career #sideprojects #portfolio

Most student AI side projects stop at 'call the API, show the response' — which teaches almost nothing about the actual job of shipping a production AI system.

Project ideas chosen for what they force you to learn

  • A RAG app over your own college's documents — forces chunking, retrieval evaluation and a confidence gate, not just prompting.
  • A rate-limited public API wrapping a model — forces auth, rate limiting and cost control from day one.
  • A background-job pipeline processing uploaded documents — forces async architecture and error handling for slow tasks.
  • A small fine-tuned classifier deployed behind an API — forces the full train-evaluate-deploy loop, not just a notebook experiment.

The filter to apply to any project idea

Ask what it forces you to learn beyond calling an API. If the honest answer is 'nothing', pick a different project — the model call is rarely the part that teaches you anything a recruiter will ask about.

See shipping side projects that survive demo day.

About 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 in a grey suit at Dr. Virendra Swarup Institute of Computer Studies (VSICS), Kanpur
At VSICS, Kanpur

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:

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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