By Shainam Kharumnuid
Thirty years ago, if you studied engineering, you became an engineer. If you studied medicine, you became a doctor. Your college degree was like a train ticket and it took you to one specific destination, and that was that. Today, that’s no longer true. Your degree still matters, but it’s no longer the only thing that decides where your career goes. Think of it less like a train ticket and more like a passport. It opens doors, but you choose where to travel.
Big Names, Surprising Degrees
Some of the world’s most successful leaders took career paths nobody would have predicted from their college majors. The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, studied Metallurgical Engineering at IIT Kharagpur. The founder of Netflix, Reed Hastings, studied mathematics. Brian Chesky, who created Airbnb (the app that lets people rent out their homes to travelers), studied fine arts. Susan Wojcicki, who ran YouTube for nearly a decade, studied history and literature. These aren’t rare exceptions anymore. They represent a growing trend.
The Pattern Is Everywhere
I studied Electrical Engineering at IIT Madras, one of India’s top engineering colleges. Today, my work has nothing to do with electrical circuits. And I’m not unusual since roughly 90% of my classmates ended up in careers unrelated to their degree. One classmate, Arvind Srinivas, went on to start Perplexity, a company building a popular AI-powered search engine. Others became management consultants, investors, and even actors.
At IIM Bangalore, one of India’s premier business schools, I met doctors and dentists from top medical colleges who were getting MBAs specifically to leave medicine behind. A senior colleague at my current company practiced dentistry in Italy for ten years before teaching himself to code and becoming a software engineer. The takeaway? People are successfully reinventing their careers at every stage of life, and the old rules about “sticking to your field” are fading fast.
What Changed?
In the mid-1990s, if you wanted to learn something advanced, you pretty much had to go to a university. Specialized knowledge lived behind classroom doors. Switching careers was seen as risky, even irresponsible. Your degree was your identity.
The internet changed all of that. Today, platforms like YouTube, Coursera, and edX offer high-quality courses from world-class universities, often for free. You can learn data analysis, graphic design, business strategy, or programming from your phone. Major companies like Google, Apple, and IBM have dropped the requirement for a college degree for many of their jobs, choosing instead to focus on what candidates can actually do.
How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing the Game
Here’s where things get really interesting. Artificial intelligence, the technology behind tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, is making it possible for people to do things that previously required years of specialized training.
For example, there’s a growing practice sometimes called “vibe coding,” where people build working apps and websites simply by describing what they want in plain language. Instead of writing complex computer code line by line, you tell an AI tool what you need, and it writes the code for you. Someone who understands what customers want, say, a psychology graduate or a small business owner, can now create a basic app or website without a computer science degree.
This doesn’t mean technical knowledge is worthless. It means the bar for getting started has dropped dramatically. What matters more now is clear thinking, good communication, and the ability to solve problems step by step. Skills that aren’t tied to any single degree.
Hiring Is Changing Too
Smart companies are rethinking how they hire. Instead of filtering candidates by which college they attended or what degree they hold, some companies now give candidates a real problem to solve, hand them AI tools, and watch how they work.
Can the candidate break a big problem into smaller pieces? Can they clearly explain what they need to an AI assistant? Can they look at the AI’s answer and tell whether it’s good or needs improvement? These practical skills are becoming more important than the name on your degree.
The Workplace Is Shifting
Inside companies, something interesting is happening. Junior employees who are comfortable using AI tools are sometimes producing better work than their more experienced colleagues who rely on doing things the old way. A marketing professional using AI to crunch numbers can now produce insights that used to require a data analyst. A literature graduate using AI research tools can write business reports that rival those from MBA students.
In other words, what you can do is starting to matter more than what your resume says you should be able to do.
What Should Students Focus On?
1. If degrees alone don’t guarantee a career path, what should students invest their time in? Here are the qualities and habits that matter most in today’s world:
2. Be a fast learner. The tools and technologies we use change constantly. The ability to pick up new skills quickly, rather than relying only on what you learned in college, is perhaps the most valuable trait you can develop.
3. Show your work. Start a blog, contribute to community projects, take on freelance assignments, or document what you’re learning. A portfolio of real work speaks louder than a certificate on the wall. Leverage Linkedin and Twitter extensively because that is where a plethora of job opportunities exist.
4. Sharpen your people skills. Communication, teamwork, creative thinking, and critical analysis are not going out of style. In fact, knowing how to clearly explain a problem, whether to a colleague or to an AI tool, is becoming one of the most sought-after abilities.
5. Build real relationships. Your professional network, the people you know and who know your work, often matters more than your qualifications on paper. While AI can help polish your resume or prepare for interviews, there’s no substitute for genuine human connection. Infact, the biggest gain that I got from IIT Madras and IIM Bangalore was the network rather than the education.
6. Learn across fields. The most valuable professionals today are those who can connect different areas of knowledge. Someone who understands both marketing and data, or both technology and human psychology, can solve problems that specialists in a single field often can’t.
7. Get comfortable with AI. You don’t need to become a programmer, but understanding how AI tools work, when to use them, and when to trust your own judgment instead is becoming as important as basic computer skills were twenty years ago. Different AI models are useful for different kinds of tasks.
8. Think like a problem-solver. Whether or not you plan to start a business, the habit of identifying problems, imagining solutions, and testing them out is incredibly valuable. AI tools make it easier than ever to experiment with ideas at low cost.
9. Stay resilient. Careers are no longer straight lines. You may switch industries, learn entirely new skills, or take on roles that don’t even exist yet. Being comfortable with uncertainty and willing to adapt is essential.
College Still Matters, Just Differently
None of this means that going to college is a waste of time. Universities still offer structured learning, valuable networks, professional credibility, and access to certain careers (you still need a medical degree to be a doctor, for instance). But a degree is increasingly just one piece of the puzzle, not the whole picture.
A Special Opportunity for Northeast India
For students in Northeast India, these changes are particularly promising. When success depends more on how well you think, communicate, and use widely available online tools than on which city you live in or which elite college you attended, geography becomes less of a barrier. The AI revolution could be especially empowering for regions that have traditionally been far from India’s major business and technology centers.
The Bottom Line
The question isn’t just “What should I study?” anymore. It’s “What can I do,what problems can I solve, and how do I keep learning?”
Your degree is a starting point, not a finish line. What truly matters is your willingness to learn, create, adapt, and grow, throughout your entire career. That path requires more self-direction and grit than simply following a syllabus, but it’s also more open, more flexible, and more rewarding than ever before. If you are currently a college student or about to go to college, make sure you start creating a Linkedin account. Follow relevant people from Silicon Valley on Twitter and Linkedin and look at what they do. Listen to Lenny’s Podcast to understand how the landscape is changing and how you can leverage this opportunity. Or if you are truly interested about AI and the tech career path in general, just reach out to me on Linkedin and I am open to helping you out as well.
