DEV Community

Cover image for When a college cancels your session at the last minute: how to handle it well
PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

When a college cancels your session at the last minute: how to handle it well

#guestspeaker #collegefests #logistics

Fest schedules slip constantly — a keynote runs long, a venue falls through, and your session gets cancelled or moved with almost no notice. How you respond matters more for the relationship than the cancellation itself.

The response that protects the relationship

  • Respond with understanding, not frustration — organisers are usually more stressed about the cancellation than you are.
  • Offer a genuine alternative: a remote follow-up session, a shorter slot the next day, a recorded version instead.
  • Don't invoice or push back on a free session's cancellation — the goodwill from being easy to work with here outweighs any lost prep time.

What this earns you

Organisers remember who was gracious about a bad situation, and gracious speakers are the ones they call again despite the earlier mess.

See what makes a college invite the same speaker back.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour presenting evaluation criteria — feasibility, innovation, practicality, problem solving — on a projector screen
Walking a room through evaluation criteria

Pranjul Rathour presenting BrandHive on a projector screen
Presenting BrandHive

Pranjul Rathour in a shirt and tie holding a microphone in front of a career-opportunities slide
A career session for students

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 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

Top comments (0)