Medicine and engineering are two of the most sought after professions in India. However, despite the popularity of these two professions and structural issues in the tertiary education system, not much is known about the correlates of working as a doctor or an engineer. In this paper, we use unit-level data from a nationally representative sample to provide estimates of determinants of being employed as a doctor or an engineer. We use instrumental variable probit model to address endogeneity of own education of those working as doctors and engineers. Parental education is significantly associated with an individual being employed as a doctor or an engineer; the marginal effect for both being 25%. Females are significantly less likely to work as engineers vis-à-vis males, while it is not so in the case of doctors. There are significant caste- and religion-based variations as well as rural-urban differences. Our findings provide novel evidence on influence of parental education on career outcomes in the developing world and offer a contrast in the discourse of glaring gender gap in STEM (science, technology, engineering, medicine) fields.