It started at Dr. Virendra Swarup Educational Foundation, where I'm completing my computer science degree. From there, the path ran through hackathons and competitions at Indian Institute of Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, and Chhatrapati Shahu Ji Maharaj University — plus MeetKats' events and the community I built, TechVerse Enclave.
Why I wrote this down
When I posted this timeline for VSICS's upcoming 2025 induction ceremony, it wasn't a highlight reel — it was context for the students about to walk in the door I walked in through a few years earlier, with Saksham Gupta and Raman Shukla already part of the story by then.
What connects all of it
None of these institutions handed me anything. Each one was a hackathon, a mentorship session, or a competition I showed up to and built something for. The map matters less than the pattern: show up, build, repeat.
Where this started
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.
