Some colleges run a standing alumni-mentor structure — a pool of past students or friendly practitioners available for ongoing questions, not just a one-off guest slot. Plugging into this changes what kind of impact is possible.
What's different about this structure
- Students reach out on their own schedule, not just during a scheduled visit — mentoring becomes continuous rather than event-shaped.
- The relationship can span years, following one student from first year through placements or a startup decision.
- It requires less prep per interaction but more ongoing availability than a single talk.
Offering to join one, even without a formal invite
Most colleges without a formal alumni-mentor programme are happy to start an informal version if a practitioner offers — a shared channel, a monthly office hour, open to any student who wants in.
See office hours for students: how I run them.
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.
