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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Your first hackathon as a first-year: how to be useful with limited skills

#hackathon #firstyears #students #mentoring

When I spoke to 100+ first-years at the VSICS BCA Induction, the most common question afterwards was some version of "how can I join a hackathon when I barely know programming?". The honest answer is that a team has more jobs than coding, and the non-coding ones are where first-years win.

Jobs that need judgement, not syntax

  • User research — talk to five people about the problem in hour one and bring back quotes. Most teams skip this; judges notice when it was done.
  • The pitch — draft the story, run the rehearsals with a timer, prepare Q&A answers. See the pitch deck template.
  • Test data — write the realistic seed data that makes the demo look alive.
  • Testing — click through the demo path every hour and report what breaks. You are the first user.
  • Documentation — the README and the submission form, written while the coders code.

How to learn during the event

Sit next to the builder and ask to own one small, real piece — a form, an API call, a page. Ask questions at the checkpoints, not every ten minutes. Take notes on decisions and why they were made; that is the architecture lesson no lecture gives you.

What gets you invited back

  • Doing the unglamorous job completely.
  • Saying "I don't know how, show me once" instead of guessing silently.
  • Staying calm when the demo breaks.
  • Following up after the event — a message with what you learned and what you want to build next.

What I tell first-years

Year one is for foundations and for showing up. Do one hackathon as the person who makes the team look organised. By year two you will be the person who builds, and you will already know how the room works. The three-year roadmap I gave at the induction is in what I told 100+ first-years.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour holding a trophy and a certificate of merit after a win
Trophy and certificate after a win

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 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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