I have been on the participant side of fests at IIT Roorkee, IIT Kanpur and CSJMU, and on the receiving end of speaker and judge invitations from colleges of every size. The outreach process is more similar across institutions than students expect, and the colleges that do it well are not always the biggest.
How fest teams find people
- Alumni networks and professors' contacts — the traditional route, biased toward seniority.
- LinkedIn and community posts — increasingly the route to practitioners who are visible online and closer to students' age.
- Previous participants and winners — the most underused source. Someone who won your hackathon two years ago is a credible judge today.
- Referrals from other speakers — ask every speaker who else they would recommend.
What a good outreach message contains
Exactly what a good speaker invitation contains anywhere: audience, outcome, dates, format, mode, contact. The full list is in how to invite a GenAI guest speaker. Fest teams add the fest's scale, the other confirmed names, and what the speaker gets — a stage, an audience, a recording, a stay.
Timelines
- Eight to twelve weeks out: first invitations to headline names.
- Six weeks: workshop and judging slots confirmed; rubric drafted with judges.
- Two weeks: logistics, travel, session prerequisites sent to students.
- Two days: technical checks, host briefings, backup plans.
Why smaller colleges often get better sessions
A 400-seat auditorium at a large institute produces a keynote. A 50-seat lab at a state university produces a workshop where every student leaves with a running project. Practitioners who care about teaching often prefer the second. Smaller colleges should invite with confidence; the session quality depends on the room and the brief, not the brand.
For practitioners who want to be invited
Publish what you build, say publicly that you are open to speaking and judging, and make it easy to book you — a page with your talks, past sessions and an email. That is exactly why my campus invite page exists.
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.
