When I spoke at the VSICS induction seminar, I was talking to a version of myself three years earlier: sure everyone else had a plan, working on an ambitious project that would fail, not yet aware that showing up was most of the game. Here is what I would say to him directly.
The ten
- Ship something small this month. Living Space Automation failed because it was big before it was real. One page, one form, one deploy — then grow.
- Post it, even though it is embarrassing. The people who invite you to speak later found you because you posted early.
- Find two people and stop overlapping. Team TechVerse won three hackathons because each of us owned a different thing.
- Talk to strangers. Networking is a skill you practise, not a talent you lack. The debate stage and the talk show at VSICS were practice.
- Be bad at something on purpose. The debate I argued against my own view taught more than the ones I agreed with.
- Measure. Write the evaluation before the model. It will feel like a delay; it is the shortcut.
- Go to the hackathon at the bigger institute. They let you in. Krishi Gyan won at IIT Roorkee.
- Ask for help properly. Context, what you tried, one question. Mentors answer that message; see how to ask a mentor for help.
- Help the year below you. It is how you learn what you know, and how a community starts.
- Nobody knows what they are doing. Some people ship anyway. Be one of them.
What I would not change
The failed project, the lost hackathon, and the engineering degree at a college in India rather than somewhere with a famous name. Each produced a story that students believe when I tell it, which turns out to be most of what a mentor has to offer.
If you are a first-year reading this: the full roadmap is in what I told 100+ first-years, and I am one message away if your college wants the talk in person.
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.
