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.