After every talk the same ten questions arrive, at the podium and in messages for the following week. Here they are with the answers I give — short, because the students who ask them need a direction, not a lecture.
The questions
- DSA or projects? Both, but projects first if you have to choose in Year 1. A shipped project makes DSA practice meaningful and gets you into rooms where it is tested.
- Which language? Python for AI, JavaScript or TypeScript for the web. Pick one, build three things, then learn the other. The language matters less than finishing.
- Is a non-IIT college a disadvantage? For campus placements, sometimes. For everything else — hackathons, open source, remote roles, startups — the internet does not check your college. I studied computer applications at VSICS in India; the wins came from showing up at IIT Roorkee and CSJMU with working projects.
- Are certificates worth it? Only as a study structure. Recruiters look at projects; see portfolio over certificates.
- How do I get into hackathons with no experience? Join a team as the person who does research, testing and the pitch; see your first hackathon as a first-year.
- Startup or job? Job first unless you already have users. Three of us started SCULT INDIA while studying, but with paying clients, not a pitch deck.
- How do I get noticed? Publish what you build — GitHub, LinkedIn, a small blog. The people who invite you to speak or judge found you because you posted.
- Is it too late to start in Year 3? No. A focused year of building beats three years of intending to.
- Which AI area should I pick? Do one RAG project, one fine-tuning project and one vision or speech project. Pick the one you did not want to stop working on.
- Will AI take our jobs? It will take the jobs of people who refuse to use it. Learn to build with it, and you become the person deciding what it does.
The question nobody asks aloud
"Am I good enough?" The honest answer is that nobody in the room knows yet, including me, and the only way to find out is to ship something and show it to someone. That is what mentors are for, and it is why I keep answering these ten.
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.
