I say yes to most student requests I get, and I still see the same avoidable mistakes in the ones I turn down or have to chase for details.
What a good invitation includes
- Who you are and what your club or department is — one line, not a paragraph.
- The audience size and format you're picturing — a 45-minute talk and a 3-hour workshop are different asks.
- Two or three date options, not a single fixed slot that might already be taken.
- Why them specifically — a generic mass-email to twenty speakers reads as exactly that.
What makes an email easy to ignore
"We'd love to have you speak sometime" with no date, no audience, and no topic. It's not that the ask is unwelcome — there's simply nothing to say yes to yet.
The follow-up that works
One polite nudge after five working days, referencing the original email. People are busy, not uninterested, more often than students assume.
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.
