Mentors do not choose the most talented students to invest in. They choose the ones whose progress they can see. After mentoring 200+ students, I can name the habits that made the difference, and none of them require being brilliant.
The six habits
- Show work, not intentions. A link to something running beats a plan for something impressive.
- Close the loop. After advice, report what happened. Mentors remember the students who came back with results, good or bad.
- Ask narrow questions. One specific question with what you tried — see how to ask a mentor for help.
- Ship between sessions. The session is where you get unstuck; the week is where you build. Students who arrive with nothing new are asking the mentor to do their motivation for them.
- Disagree with reasons. "I tried your suggestion and it didn't fit because…" is the beginning of a real conversation.
- Help someone behind you. The moment a mentee starts answering first-years' questions, they have understood what the community is for.
What mentors quietly stop doing
Replying quickly to students who never follow up. Making introductions for students who did not use the last one. Suggesting projects to students who have not finished the previous one. None of this is punishment; it is triage, and every mentor does it.
The habit that predicts the most
Closing the loop. It costs one message and it separates the students I still hear from a year later from the ones I do not. Team TechVerse — the group that won three hackathons in 2025 — started as students who closed loops.
If you are a mentee reading this
Pick one habit and do it this week. Send the message with what happened. That is the whole trick.
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.
