Everything on this site happened from a tier-2 Indian city. The engineering degree at VSICS, the hackathon wins at IIT Roorkee and CSJMU, the MeetKats event where Annapurna won BYTEBATTLE, TechVerse Enclave, SCULT INDIA. Students here often assume the interesting work happens elsewhere. Some of it does; most of what matters early does not. Here is the local map.
Communities
- MeetKats — a local community that runs real events with real judging; BYTEBATTLE was theirs.
- TechVerse Enclave — the community we started at VSICS, now 500+ members across AI, web, security, data and startups, with sessions and hackathon teams.
- College clubs and departments — VSICS's Computer Applications department ran INSIGHT, the cybersecurity awareness event and the debate competitions I took part in. Your college has equivalents; find who runs them.
- Online communities of practitioners — where remote roles and collaborations actually appear.
Events within reach
- CSJMU's Vividhotsava and its Product Genesis pitch competition, which we won with BrandHive.
- IIT Kanpur's hackathons, where we placed in the top three.
- IIT Roorkee's National Social Summit and Changethon, a train ride away, where Krishi Gyan won.
- Every college's technical fest within a few hours; most welcome outside teams.
What I would do again
- Form a team early and keep it — Team TechVerse won three times because we had stopped overlapping.
- Say yes to the college's stage: the debate, the talk show, the induction. Speaking practice compounds.
- Start the community before it feels justified. Thirty members who build is enough.
- Ship for a local client. It taught more than any course and became a company.
What I would do differently
Post earlier and more specifically, start the evaluation habit on the first project rather than the fourth, and travel to one more hackathon a year. None of these required leaving India.
If you run a college club or community in India or anywhere in Uttar Pradesh and want a session, a judge or a mentor who has done this from here, I am a short message away: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com, or the invite page.
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.
