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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

What I wish someone had told me before my first hackathon judging gig

#hackathonjudging #gettingstarted #firsttime

First-time judging comes with a handful of surprises that a rubric alone doesn't prepare you for — the actual pace and fatigue of a long event, and a few genuinely awkward moments most first-timers don't expect.

What surprises most first-time judges

  • How mentally tiring back-to-back pitches actually are — attention genuinely degrades faster than it feels like it should.
  • How often a team asks a judge directly, mid-pitch, whether their idea is good — and how important it is to stay neutral until scoring, not tip your hand.
  • How much of the day is logistics and waiting, not actual judging — pack patience, not just a rubric.

The one piece of advice that would have helped most

Score and write notes immediately after each pitch, before the next team starts — this single habit, mentioned upfront, would have saved a lot of end-of-day scrambling to remember details.

See five mistakes every first-time hackathon judge makes.

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 2026-09-11.

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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