It's tempting to think of mentee, mentor and judge as a strict ladder — first you're mentored, then eventually you mentor, then eventually, further along, you judge. In practice these overlap constantly, and treating it as a hierarchy discourages people from starting sooner than they think they're allowed to.
Why the overlap is actually normal
- A second-year student can genuinely mentor a first-year, while still being mentored themselves by someone further along.
- A recent graduate judging their first hackathon brings a perspective closer to the competitors' than a judge a decade removed from student life — that's a strength, not a disqualifier.
- Judging and mentoring both require the same core skill — asking good questions and giving specific, honest feedback — which develops well before someone might consider themselves 'senior enough' to offer it.
The actual bar to clear
Not seniority, but whether you can give feedback that's specific, honest and useful. Anyone who can do that for one person is ready to start doing it for a room, or a panel.
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.
