And what the switch actually cost them
Ask a hundred Indian teenagers what they plan to study and a large share will say engineering. Not because they want to, in most cases, but because the question arrived pre-answered. The entrance exam system, the coaching industry built around it, the quiet social arithmetic of a family that has already decided what a stable life looks like, all of it points one way.
India produces well over a million engineering graduates a year. A significant proportion never work a day in the field. Most drift into IT services, consulting, sales or banking, anywhere that treats a technical degree as a general-purpose credential. A much smaller number go somewhere stranger.
What follows is a list of people who took the degree, or started it, and went into acting and music instead. Some finished. Some walked out halfway. One of them still runs the business he built after the acting did not work the first time. The interesting part is not that they switched. Plenty of people switch. It is what those four years did, or failed to do, on the way out.
1. Kriti Sanon
B.Tech, Electronics and Communication, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida
Sanon completed the full degree. That matters more than it sounds, because finishing a B.Tech while privately planning to leave the field takes a particular sort of patience, four years spent on something already written off.
She has described herself as a serious student through the early part of college, with the interest shifting somewhere around the second year. By graduation she had moved toward modelling, and acting followed. Her debut came in Telugu cinema before she moved into Hindi films, and she won a Filmfare Award for Best Female Debut for Heropanti.
The Jaypee campus in Noida is a standard private engineering college, the kind that feeds thousands of graduates a year into the NCR tech corridor. Nothing about the environment pointed toward film. She is a clean example of the most common version of this story: complete the degree, keep the family satisfied, then leave.
2. Vicky Kaushal
Electronics and Telecommunications, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology, Mumbai
Kaushal did not only finish the degree, he worked as an engineer for a period afterwards. That places him in a much smaller category than most of this list. He did the job. He then stopped doing the job.
His entry into film came sideways, through theatre and through assisting on sets rather than through auditions. That route, learning the industry from behind the camera before stepping in front of it, is one of the more reliable ways in for people without connections, and it is slower than almost anything else.
There is a detail worth sitting with. Kaushal's father is an action director, so he was not an outsider in the way some others here were. But he did not use that as a shortcut into leading roles either. The engineering degree and the early working stint suggest a family that wanted a fallback regardless of how close they sat to the industry.
3. Taapsee Pannu
Computer Science Engineering, Guru Tegh Bahadur Institute of Technology, New Delhi
Pannu is the most technically committed of the group. She finished the degree and then worked as a software engineer before entering entertainment. She has spoken about building a mobile application with friends during college, which places her firmly among people who were genuinely engaged with the subject rather than enduring it.
She entered the industry through a Channel V audition, debuted in Telugu cinema in 2010 with Jhummandi Naadam, moved through Tamil films, and arrived in Hindi cinema with Chashme Baddoor in 2013. A National Film Award and two Filmfare Awards followed. She also runs an event management company and owns a badminton franchise, which is its own kind of answer to the fallback question.
What separates her from most people here is the advice she gives. Pannu has openly told newcomers to keep a plan B. That is close to heresy in an industry built on stories of total commitment, of burning the boats, of the guy who slept outside a studio for two years until somebody noticed. Her position is the opposite, and it comes from having had a real alternative career she could have returned to.
Whether a plan B makes you less likely to succeed or simply less likely to be destroyed by failing is an argument the industry has never settled.
4. Kartik Aaryan
Biotechnology Engineering, D. Y. Patil College of Engineering, Navi Mumbai
Aaryan's version has a wrinkle the others do not. He is from Gwalior, from a family of doctors, and he chose an engineering college in Navi Mumbai at least partly because it put him in the right city.
He auditioned while still enrolled. His debut came in 2011 with Pyaar Ka Punchnama, during the degree rather than after it. So the engineering was less a fallback than a cover story, four years of legitimate enrolment that bought him proximity to an industry his family had no interest in. He has since picked up a National Film Award and a Filmfare Award.
He graduated. He also became an actor. Doing both simultaneously is rarer than doing either.
The broader point here is geography. Half the battle for anyone trying to enter Hindi cinema is being physically in Mumbai long enough for something to happen, and an engineering seat is one of the very few reasons an Indian family will fund four years in an expensive city.
5. Abhiraj Gupta
Civil Engineering, Babu Banarasi Das College, Lucknow
Gupta is from Banda, a district in Uttar Pradesh that appears on nobody's map of talent pipelines. Hindi medium schooling. A father in state government service, a mother at home. The family moved to Lucknow when he was sixteen, and he enrolled in civil engineering there.
He never finished it. He left for Mumbai and joined Kishore Namit Kapoor's acting institute instead.
The Mumbai stretch lasted roughly eighteen months. He auditioned constantly. He took a crowd role in a Netflix series that paid a thousand rupees. He walked out of an audition for a crime series because he did not want the part. Rent came from his parents, an arrangement he has described as investing in a business without knowledge.
Then he did the thing almost nobody on these lists does. He went home.
The standard narrative requires the struggle to end in a break. Gupta's ended in a return to Uttar Pradesh and an import export business, built from nothing in a family where the recorded occupations were engineering, law and medicine, and where nobody had run a company. He has been direct about why he chose it anyway. It was the route that bought freedom in a way a salaried job would not.
The music continued alongside it. He wrote the lyrics and shares the composing credit on Aao Chalo, released by Times Music in November 2019, sung by Soham Naik with music by Shivang Mathur, directed by Akshay K Agarwal. He appears in the video opposite Ishita Sood. In April 2025, Zee Music Company released Sukoon Hai, written and composed entirely by Gupta, sung by Shivang Mathur, with Gupta on screen alongside Jyoti Sharma.
Six years between the two. He is self-taught as a composer and is also a certified RJ from All India Radio.
He is the only person on this list for whom the fallback career is still running, and the only one who built it without the degree to fall back on.
Aao Chalo · Sukoon Hai · Apple Music
6. Sonu Sood
Electronics Engineering, Yeshwantrao Chavan College of Engineering, Nagpur
Sood took the longest and least direct route on this list. He completed the degree in Nagpur, moved into modelling, and then spent years working primarily outside Hindi cinema, in Telugu, Tamil and Kannada films, before Hindi audiences knew his name.
That detour reflects something structural. For actors without connections, the southern industries have often been more accessible than Bollywood, and a career built there before crossing over is a well-worn path that receives far less attention than it should.
He then became widely known to the general public for reasons entirely unrelated to either engineering or acting, during the pandemic, which is a career arc no amount of planning produces.
7. Riteish Deshmukh
Architectural Engineering, Kamla Raheja College of Architecture, Mumbai
Deshmukh is the exception here, the one who never quite abandoned the discipline. He practised for about a year with an overseas architectural firm and has continued designing since returning to India.
Architecture sits oddly within the engineering family. It is technical, but it is also a design practice, and those skills transfer to visual work in ways that circuit theory does not. Of everyone on this list, his degree is the one that arguably still informs the work.
His entry into film also carried a complication most others did not have. His father was Vilasrao Deshmukh, former Chief Minister of Maharashtra, which brings its own set of expectations about what a respectable career looks like, and film is not usually on that list either.
8. Sushant Singh Rajput
Mechanical Engineering, Delhi College of Engineering, dropped out in the third year
Rajput is the clean break, and the most academically decorated person on this list. He ranked seventh in the All India Engineering Entrance Examination in 2003, which puts him in a bracket of a few dozen students nationally out of several hundred thousand who sat the exam.
He left in the third year of mechanical engineering at Delhi College of Engineering to pursue acting. He moved through theatre and dance, then television, then films.
Dropping out is the version of this story families fear most, because the degree is not only a qualification, it is a receipt. It proves the money was not wasted. Leaving in year three means there is no receipt, and for many households that is the unbearable part, more than the acting itself. Walking away from an AIEEE rank of seven made it starker still.
What the pattern actually shows
Read these eight together and several things emerge.
Finishing is more common than quitting. Six of the eight completed the degree. The romantic version of an artist's origin story involves a dramatic exit, but most of these people sat their final exams first. That is partly about family, partly about hedging, and partly about the fact that walking away from an Indian engineering seat in year three is a social event, not merely a personal decision.
The degree buys time and location more than skills. Nobody here uses electronics or biotechnology in their work. What the four years supplied was legitimacy, frequently in a city where the industry actually is, during which auditions and theatre and contacts could accumulate quietly. Kartik Aaryan's case is the most explicit version, but the logic applies broadly.
Nobody made a clean single transition. There is modelling in between, or theatre, or television, or regional cinema, or in one case an entire second company. The straight line from engineering college to film set does not exist. The route is always longer and more lateral than the summary suggests.
The fallback usually disappears. Once. Most people here abandoned the alternative career entirely. Gupta is the outlier, and his position is unusual enough to be worth thinking about. The business is not what he does instead of acting. It is what makes the acting financially possible without needing anyone's approval. That is a materially different relationship to a day job than waiting tables until the break arrives.
Geography decides a great deal. Mumbai, Delhi, Noida, Nagpur. The two people here from genuinely small places, Gwalior and Banda, both had to solve the location problem before anything else could happen, and they solved it differently. One used a college seat. The other moved with no plan and went home when the money ran out.
The uncomfortable part
Lists like this get written because they are encouraging. Look, they say, these people escaped. So can you.
The honest reading is less cheerful. Every name here survived a process that discards almost everyone who enters it. For each of these eight there are thousands of engineering graduates who tried acting, gave it two or three years, and are now doing something else entirely without anyone writing about them. The degree did not cause the success. In most cases the degree was the thing being escaped.
What the list does demonstrate is that the escape is survivable. You can spend four years on something you did not want, leave, fail at the thing you did want, and still end up somewhere. Gupta's version, eighteen months of unsuccessful auditions followed by a company followed by two major-label releases, is messier than the standard arc and probably far closer to how it actually goes for people without a surname that opens doors.
Taapsee Pannu's advice about a plan B looks, in that light, less like caution and more like accuracy.
