A nervous team pitching in front of a judges' table reads every small signal — a judge checking their phone, a side conversation, a confused frown — as feedback on the pitch itself, whether or not that's what the judge meant.
What helps a team perform their best
- Full attention during the pitch itself — save note-writing for the gaps between sentences, not constant head-down scribbling.
- A neutral, attentive expression rather than visible reactions mid-pitch, positive or negative — both can throw a nervous presenter off.
- Asking questions that are genuinely about understanding the project, not testing whether the team can be rattled.
What undermines it
Side conversations between judges during a pitch are the single most common and most damaging habit — it visibly signals disinterest to a team that's already nervous, regardless of how the scoring actually goes.
See handling Q&A after a technical talk for the speaker's-side version of managing a room's attention.
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.
