The REELS Deal

Gen Zs are dropping out of college and abandoning stable careers to become content creators-betting their futures on follower counts, brand deals and the promise of a fragile fame

- By Nabodita Ganguly and Deepsekhar Choudhury

After a quick meal and a brisk workout, Ishan Sharma is downing a protein shake. By 10:30am, he's in office-getting the ring light set so it doesn't reflect on his spectacles, tweaking the camera angle, while a whiteboard packed with thumbnail sketches and punchline hooks stands in a corner.

The day hums with energy: scripting reels, spitballing ideas, fielding calls with founders, venture-capital investors and corporate operators and peddling his influence over 3mn followers on social-media platforms.

But this wasn't the original plan.

"Back in 2014, I read a news story about an IIT Roorkee student getting a Rs 2-crore package from Uber. That was a big moment for me and my dad...It looked flashy, aspirational," says the 24-year-old who grew up in Pune (see interview, pg 54).

Over the next few years, he did the things every Indian teenager does to get into a top engineering college and made it to the Goa campus of BITS Pilani. His goal was within striking distance-it was a college that big tech firms like Google and Microsoft hired from.

Yet, Sharma dropped out of his electrical engineering course in his third year in 2022. His goal had changed by then-as the content-creation bug had bitten him.

"I was just waking up, eating and trying to retain as much information as I could," he says. "It felt empty."

Switching the Career Playbook

About 1,200km away from Pune, a 22-year-old in Jaipur who uses the moniker Zendria on social media has a similar story to tell. She dropped out of Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur-considered to be a premier engineering college-to focus on content creation full-time.