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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Time management for CS students trying to ship projects and pass exams at the same time

#career #timemanagement #students

Students building a portfolio while carrying a full course load usually end up sacrificing one entirely during exam weeks, then feeling behind on the other for the rest of the semester.

A structure that protects both

  • Fixed, small side-project time (even 45 minutes, most days) beats occasional long weekend binges that never survive exam season.
  • Batch project work into short, well-defined milestones — 'ship the retrieval step this week' — rather than an open-ended 'work on the project'.
  • During exam weeks, explicitly pause the project rather than half-attending to both; a clean pause is easier to resume than a project left in a broken half-state.

The habit that actually protects momentum

Write a one-line note before pausing a project — what you were about to do next — so resuming after exams takes minutes, not an hour of re-reading your own code to remember the plan.

See coding contests vs hackathons: the career trade-off for a related time-allocation decision.

About Pranjul Rathour

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

Pranjul Rathour in front of an Integral Startup Foundation hackathon backdrop
At an Integral Startup Foundation hackathon

Pranjul Rathour in a checked shirt inside a packed college auditorium
In a packed college auditorium

Pranjul Rathour in a suit and tie with a lanyard at a formal campus event
At a formal campus event

Portrait of Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer, wearing wire-frame glasses
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:

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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