Students building a portfolio while carrying a full course load usually end up sacrificing one entirely during exam weeks, then feeling behind on the other for the rest of the semester.
A structure that protects both
- Fixed, small side-project time (even 45 minutes, most days) beats occasional long weekend binges that never survive exam season.
- Batch project work into short, well-defined milestones — 'ship the retrieval step this week' — rather than an open-ended 'work on the project'.
- During exam weeks, explicitly pause the project rather than half-attending to both; a clean pause is easier to resume than a project left in a broken half-state.
The habit that actually protects momentum
Write a one-line note before pausing a project — what you were about to do next — so resuming after exams takes minutes, not an hour of re-reading your own code to remember the plan.
See coding contests vs hackathons: the career trade-off for a related time-allocation decision.
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.
