Most speaker invitations I receive are one line: "Sir, we want a session on AI, are you available?" I say yes to many of them anyway, but the coordinators who send a complete first email get better sessions, because I can prepare for their students instead of guessing. Here is what to send.
The first email
- Who the students are — course, year, batch size, what they already know.
- What you want them to leave with — belief, skill or decision (see mentorship session, workshop or talk).
- Two or three date options, with the time slot and duration.
- The format and room — auditorium talk, lab workshop, seminar-hall mentorship session.
- Mode — on-site, remote or hybrid, and who handles travel if on-site.
- Who else is speaking and whether there is a broader event.
- One contact person with a phone number.
Logistics that decide the session
- Projector and audio tested with the speaker's laptop an hour before.
- Wi-Fi that survives sixty devices for workshops, plus a hotspot fallback.
- Tables for hands-on sessions; auditoriums are for talks only.
- A shared document with links and code sent to students the day before.
- A student host who has read the speaker's work and can introduce them in two lines.
Honorarium and travel
Be direct. Many practitioners, including me, speak free for student communities and ask only for travel when on-site. Others have a fee. Asking in the first email saves everyone an awkward third email.
After the session
- Photos and a short write-up the speaker can share — with the college named correctly.
- The two-week follow-up numbers: who did the task, who joined the club (see measuring the impact of a campus session).
- A thank-you that mentions one specific thing students took away. It is the part speakers keep.
My own talk menu, past sessions and logistics are on the campus invite page; the email is pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
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.
