'Tell me about a project' is the single most common interview question, and the single most commonly botched one — a chronological retelling of every step, with the interesting decision buried in minute four.
A structure that works
- The problem, in one sentence: what wasn't working, for whom.
- The interesting decision: the one trade-off or technical choice that actually mattered, and why you made it that way.
- The result: what changed, ideally with a number.
- One thing you'd do differently now — this signals growth, not weakness.
Practice the thirty-second version first
If you can't compress your project into thirty seconds using this structure, you haven't yet identified what actually mattered about it. Build the short version first, then let the interviewer's follow-up questions pull out the depth.
See an AI portfolio of projects that get interviews.
GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).
Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
