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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Talks I offer colleges: RAG, fine-tuning, shipping AI, hackathons and careers

#guestspeaker #talkmenu #campus #genai

Coordinators ask what I can speak about, so here is the menu as it stands, with what each session is for. Every talk is built from things I have shipped, won or lost, and every workshop ends with students running something they built. All of these can be on-site anywhere in India or remote.

Talks (40–60 minutes)

  • From college hackathons to production AI — the roadmap I gave 100+ first-years at the VSICS induction, extended: Year 1 foundations, Year 2 hackathons and internships, Year 3 placements or a startup. For inductions and fests.
  • What I learned winning three hackathons and losing one — Changethon at IIT Roorkee, Product Genesis at CSJMU, BYTEBATTLE, and STROT; the pitch, the demo, the team. For hackathon kick-offs.
  • Production RAG that refuses to hallucinate — hybrid retrieval, reranking, confidence gates and citations, from building RAG.NextUpgrad. For CS and AI batches.
  • Shipping AI as a small team — five production AI apps in a year, and what a 14-member student-led team gets right and wrong. For entrepreneurship cells.
  • AI for everyone else — an honest AI literacy session for non-CS departments; see an AI awareness session for non-CS students.

Workshops (90 minutes to a full day)

  • Build a RAG app from scratch — the one-day GenAI workshop syllabus; 90-minute and half-day versions available.
  • Fine-tune a small model on a free GPU — QLoRA end to end with an honest base-versus-tuned evaluation, based on FineTune Studio.
  • Ship it — FastAPI, Next.js, Docker, logs and a deploy, in one afternoon.

Mentoring and judging

  • Mentorship sessions built around students' own projects and decisions.
  • Hackathon judging with a published rubric and written feedback for every team, and hackathon mentoring before or during events.
  • Portfolio and mock-interview clinics for placement cells.

Logistics

Sessions for student communities are free; on-site visits ask for travel. I need the students' year and prior knowledge a week ahead, and a tested projector on the day. Everything else — past sessions, photographs, the invitation checklist — is on the campus invite page, and the email is pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.

About Pranjul Rathour

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

Pranjul Rathour on stage presenting a requirements-gathering and user-flow slide
Requirements gathering, on stage

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 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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