A 'guest of honour' invite sounds purely ceremonial — arrive, get garlanded, leave. Done well, the role is closer to a short, high-energy guest speaking slot with extra visibility.
What the role actually needs
- A short, upbeat address (10-15 minutes) that respects the ceremonial format but still gives students one real, usable idea.
- Genuine time on the floor afterward — walking the exhibits, talking to a few teams, not just sitting on stage.
- Willingness to be in photos with students and organisers; this is often the actual reason a fest wants a guest of honour, and it's a fair trade for the platform they're giving you.
Making the ceremonial version worth it anyway
Ask the organisers beforehand if you can also run a short breakout session later in the day — many fests welcome this, and it turns a purely ceremonial slot into a real teaching opportunity too.
See speaking topics I offer colleges for formats that adapt well to this dual role.
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.
