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Watch The Episode

Synopsis

We’ve always wondered what it would’ve been like to live each other’s uni lives — so in this episode, we finally sat down and asked. I went through NUS Medicine, the well-trodden local path with all its budget backup plans and prelim disasters; Isaac took the scenic route through Cambridge Law before circling back to medicine at Duke-NUS. Turns out we both missed out on some very different things.

We get into the culture shock of formal dinners and £6 supermarket wine, the very real FOMO of never once going night cycling with university buddies, and the moments — a Moroccan desert night, a freezing bike ride blasting Jay Chou — that somehow still live rent-free in our heads years later. We also talk about how differently “success” got defined for each of us, and whether all those what-ifs actually matter in the end.

It’s a pretty honest look at the roads we didn’t take, the ones we did, and why — most days, anyway — we’ve made peace with where we landed. If you’ve ever wondered whether the other path would’ve been better, this one’s for you.

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Episode Transcript

Isaac
Hello, I’m Isaac.

Faith
And I’m Faith.

Isaac
And welcome to the We Didn’t Plan This podcast. So Faith, today our episode is titled The Ones Who Left and The Ones Who Stayed and The Ones Meaning Each One of Us. And today we’re going to talk a little bit more about I think what most people would consider a very pivotal chapter of our life which was uni, the last slivers of childhood and the first glimpses of adulthood.

Faith
The last bit of freedom we had.

Isaac
And we both went through slightly different undergrad experiences. So maybe let’s quickly introduce you. You went to NUS Medicine right?

Faith
Yeah, undergrad medicine and then followed the fairly routine path of just graduating and becoming an adult. Whereas for Isaac, he went to Cambridge Law for his undergrad and did postgraduate medicine in Duke NUS in Singapore.

Isaac
It’s a little cold rainy town outside of London. But to kick off, I guess, one thing that I always wonder with all my medical colleagues, and they all have different answers to this, which is, was NUS Medicine always the plan? Was it the only option on the table for you? Or what were the others?

Faith
Okay, so truth be told, NUS Medicine was my first choice because obviously, studying locally in Singapore was the cheapest option for my parents. even though I actually always had a desire to go overseas, to get the overseas experience that everyone seems to talk about, and then they come back really cool and change people. Whereas those of us who stayed in Singapore, we just stayed the same. We stayed with our parents the whole way. So actually, I wanted to apply to the UK for medicine, but it was contingent on me having a good predicted grade for chemistry at A-levels, but I totally flunked my prelims. I think I got like, I did terribly. So I got a projected B, which did not let me apply to the UK directly. So I had to use my backup option, which was the International Medical University in Malaysia, which offers a transitional program. You do like two years in KL, and then you transfer to an accredited UK university overseas or like Australia, and you come back with a degree from that uni. So that actually is the route that some of our batchmates actually went through.

Isaac
And I heard you can’t go to IMU anymore, right? Is it still on the MOH list?

Faith
I don’t know because technically you don’t graduate from IMU. You graduate from the university when you transfer out for your clinical years.

Isaac
Ah, yeah, but plot twist. She got into NUS. She’s one of the good ones.

Faith
Thankfully, that saved my parents’ money.

Isaac
Yeah, no, that’s interesting because I’ve heard of people going all across the globe to places like Ireland, Australia, UK. When I was a med student, I was in the operating theatre with this other med student who looked a fair bit older. So I asked him, what brings you here? And it turns out that he was early 31 and he was doing an elective abroad from his post-grad degree in New Zealand. And he went to study undergrad in the UK. And then before that, he went to poly. He worked for three years.

Faith
Wow. It’s quite a journey.

Isaac
So, people get into medicine in many, many ways, I think.

Faith
You included. Yeah. So for you, was Cambridge Law always the plan or did you just apply and see how it goes?

Isaac
So to be really honest, I would love to say that this was all by design and I’ve been dreaming of this since I was 13 and all. But honestly, I think I changed my mind about uni about three times in the year that I was last in school. So in JC2, I think there was this dream that I wanted to go to the US. This whole idea of being in a California sunset, something…

Faith
Relatable.

Isaac
Exactly. All on a government scholarship, fully paid for, with a bit of an allowance. That was the first dream. That was the first dream. Then, at that point in time, I don’t think it’s the case nowadays, you had to take two rounds of SAT. So I did one in JC1, and then I did okay. Then I was going to prepare for the second one. Then I saw that I had to choose something like bio and physics and something. And I said, yeah, screw it. So then that kind of went away. I also didn’t get the scholarship. I’m a scholarship reject because I clearly didn’t interview very well. And after that, then the next thing I just defaulted to was going with the flow. So I guess I have the privilege of having a few friends who are a lot smarter than myself. So where they were mostly contemplating was around this realm of things. they wanted to go study politics, PPE, psychology, law, things like that, all in the UK. And it’s a very familiar place for a lot of Singaporeans. I think maybe a grand total of each given university in the UK, right? Especially the ones in London, they have hundreds of Singaporeans every year. So it felt to me like, okay, I go London, I go study with my friends, life is good. And that was pretty much all the thought I ever put into it.

Faith
But that being said, it’s still Cambridge. You don’t just walk into there by accident. For you, was there any culture shock the first day that you stepped through those doors? Do you feel like it was more prestigious or more fancy at Atas than you thought it would be or more laid back?

Isaac
I actually thought it was very much more the latter because so many people think that there are these names of fancy schools abroad and they’re all going to feel like Hogwarts or going to feel like, what’s the show? You know the attorney who goes to Harvard?

Faith
What, Suits?

Isaac
Not suits. There’s this girl who goes to Harvard law and then there’s…

Faith
Legally blonde?

Isaac
Legally blonde, yes. Legally blonde,

Faith
Okay, so… Okay, so you were Elle Woods.

Isaac
Yeah, we think we’d be Elle Woods or Harvey Specter in whichever day of the week it is, right? And I actually felt that, “Oh, it’s just this, it’s a sleepy town, nothing really opens past six or seven, you just go there and you study.” And I thought that there were some pretty cool things, like we had these formal dinners where it’s not something you have to sign up for, but every hall in school, you have these dinners every once or two weeks, they’re optional. So if you want to turn up for it, you pay like, I think, 10 pounds, which is about $15, $16. You have to turn up in a tux.

Faith
One of those balls, is it? Like you have to show up and dine at a fancy long table.

Isaac
Oh yeah, no, we had those. Those are at the end of the year. They’re like an annual occurrence. You have to pay a fat amount of money to attend them. But the ones I was talking about are things that literally happen every single week. You just sign up for them. Wear a tux. It’s so cozy. Yeah, and then most of the time you just go there, eat a three-course dinner that looks fancy but doesn’t taste fancy and then you kind of get drunk on £6 wine from the supermarket and then go out afterwards, right?

Faith
So is it just like socialise or just get drunk and have nice food?

Isaac
Yeah, so it’s like I think it was those things that were a little bit quirky and really brought home the experience. But I think culturally, one of the bigger shocks was that everyone was actually a lot more laid back. I thought that it would be a leveled up version of whatever was in JC high school and all that, right? Which is what one would expect from uni, especially since it was so hard to get in. But then when I got there, I really felt like a lot of the pressure was taken off. And why I say that is because I had a decent number of counterparts in Singapore. And then, you know, they’re studying in all of the different, you know, NUS faculties, whatever. And then everyone from year one is talking about, which internships are you going for, which modules are you balloting for next month, am I going to get kicked out of Hall if I don’t go for X number of overnight cycling trips. And then when I was there, everyone was just doing their own thing. You know, there are these people who are mugging away. Spoiler alert, they’re almost always Asian.

Faith
Great assumption.

Isaac
And the rest of the people, there’s some of them who really want to be lawyers, there’s some of them who actually went into law, but from day one, they know they want to do something else consulting, banking, do their own startup. There were, I think, maybe 60% of people who just chill and you don’t really worry about jobs. No one ever really talked about grades. And I thought that was quite different in a somewhat refreshing way because you have the scope to be as smart or as crazy of a muggle as you want. But at the same time, you can completely opt out of that without feeling as if there’s any sort of peer pressure around it, if that makes sense.

Faith
Yeah, I mean, it’s absolute free will. I mean, compared to the Singapore university culture, which unfortunately, I mean, I experienced, or rather didn’t get to fully experience.

Isaac
Yeah, so I mean, you mentioned that, and I hear a lot of stereotypes or rumblings, especially if you study medicine, maybe a close second runner-up locally will be law, who people say you don’t get to experience the whole local uni life, right? there’s an entire lifestyle and an entire slew of fun things that comes with that. Tell us more about what that normal experience is supposed to look like and then tell us about your experience.

Faith
Yeah, so normal Singapore uni experience is you just join another non-medical faculty, you stay in hall, you join a CCA, a fun extracurricular, you make friends in hall, you go out partying late at night or just getting drunk in your rooms, and you have to ballot for modules, as you said just now. So people ballot for modules in a really kiasu way. And they’re like, you know, by buying concert tickets. You’ll just start waiting and hoping you get the module you like. If not, you just sit in some other module and half-ass it. And then you have to stress about your GPA and mug while still juggling enough of a social life to stay in a hall and not get kicked out. Because there’s like social requirements, I think. Yeah, whereas for medicine, we don’t really get that. I don’t even know how to ballot for a module, honestly.

Isaac
So how many times have you eaten Niqqi’s Cheese Prata at West Coast?

Faith
What? What is that? No, like the whole night cycling thing or like hanging out with friends. That was a very rare and obsolete experience for most of us med students, I think.

Isaac
That’s crazy because I used to eat a lot of Niqqi’s Cheese Prata every time. Because you know outside NUS, there’s this supper stretch that everyone knows about. And then you have the prata, you have Fong Seng Nasi Lemak.

Faith
Isn’t it the other side? It’s the other side of NUS.

Isaac
Yeah.

Faith
It’s not near the Medicine campus and the Kent Ridge side, is it?

Isaac
No, it’s near West Coast very terminal.

Faith
Dang, you see, that’s all the stuff we missed out on because we were stuck on the Kent Ridge side of campus.

Isaac
Oh no. So, okay, tell us a little bit about what your campus life looked like maybe on the daily. What’s the busiest and what does the least busy day look like?

Faith
Okay, honestly, it was not that busy. It’s just that I think most of us in Medicine didn’t really stay in halls. So for a lot of us, it’s just you show up for the AM lecture if you feel like, I mean, Most of the time we would choose to stay home or just slack off. And then after the morning lectures are done, you go for lunch with your friends at the science canteen. And then maybe you have an afternoon tutorial and then you just take a train home because Kent Ridge MRT is walking distance. So why should we go to explore the rest of the campus and explore the other faculties? Everyone just wanted to go home and study or sleep or chill. Yeah.

Isaac
Well, I mean, it sounds like, okay, supper and late night cycling aside, I’m sure there were still some nice bits and some bits that you feel a little bit nostalgic about. People say you need the best part of your life before life truly happens. And I’m wondering if there’s a moment that really, really stuck in your head that you look upon quite fondly up until today.

Faith
I think one of the nice parts about NUS Medicine is that we have houses, and each house is like a house room. So a house is about 30 people times 10 different houses. And we each have a common room within our NUS Medicine building. So in there, I remember we had jamming sessions. Some people had keyboards, some people brought guitars and cajuns, and then my housemates would just sit and sing or chill. And even if you’re sitting in there studying, someone’s going to be jamming on the guitar quite pleasantly, like background elevator music. Yeah, so I think those were nice bonding moments. But of course, that was only for the first two years, because once we hit the clinical years in the wards, no one went back to the house rooms. Everyone was just busy, dispersed over all the hospitals in Singapore. We never saw each other again, I guess.

Isaac
I’m imagining that MD, is it MD6 or MD1 or something? It’s like this place where you roam the halls and then you hear some lofi music playing over.

Faith
And then you’ve got other people in other houses playing Xbox on the big screen, which is also fun.

Isaac
So I bring this up because I’m sure some people who might be listening in are maybe a little bit younger, dreaming of studying medicine after following the footsteps of this distinguished Rafflesian alumna over here who embodied everything a young Rafflesian student should be. But yeah, you know, that’s a nice balanced picture of what NUS medicine looked like, right?

Faith
Yeah. So for you, is there any particular moment of your life in Cambridge law that still lives in your head ran free?

Isaac
So I think the more typical common sense moment would be… There are two. So the first one is a moment that’s obviously not in school. It’s going on holiday, getting the chance to… I think it was a $50 or $80 flight that we took to Morocco over summer. Oh my, I’m jealous. With my uni mates, we were just sleeping under the stars in the desert after riding our camels. That was very fun. But I think the moment that really stays a lot more with me was there was one particular very normal morning where I was cycling to my lecture and you cycle every day everywhere. It’s kind of faster than taking the bus or even driving actually. Not that many people drove there. But then it was about 10 degrees. I was wearing my gloves cycling. It was slightly rainy and very miserable. I remember I was blasting this Jay Chou song very loudly in my headphones. And I remember despite the fact that most times I really dread the morning freezing commute. There was a morning where I just, I don’t know, I think it’s the Jay Chou that made me feel some kind of way, right?

Faith
Sentimental and like, you are in the MV.

Isaac
Exactly. And I thought that in that moment of main character energy, it kind of embodied everything that I guess they tell you Yumi is supposed to be. where you do something new, you go to a new place, you try new things, you study new things, you meet new people and you bring that whole… You just get your horizons expanded, right? I know this is very exaggerated and poetic for a moment where I’m cycling, listening…

Faith
You’ve absolutely romanticised the Cambridge experience. What’s next? Rowing on a board?

Isaac
The funny thing about rowing, right? I spent six years of my secondary and JC life in canoeing. And the worst part of that, right, was waking up at 5.30 just so that you can go for training at 6.30. So most of me and my batchmates, we swear to ourselves that we’ll never ever torture ourselves like that again. So guess which interest group or club I joined first thing when I went to uni?

Faith
Wow, Stockholm Syndrome,

Isaac
Yes, back to rowing. Except you’re doing it in 5 degree weather and you’re oars in the boat. You know, like that’s one of the times it actually breaks up. And it hits an ice block in the river when you do it. And then you do that at five. You do that at five degrees. And you also do it a little bit hungover sometimes. And I suffice to say, stop that after about three months. But I guess it’s all part of the experience. It’s all part of the experience, right?

Faith
Yeah. So, I mean, how did you feel when you were forced to come back to Singapore after everything ended? Do you feel like you were stepping back into Singapore life a step backwards?

Isaac
Well, I think first of all, it definitely wasn’t something that was false perceived, which is a good thing. I think the great thing about uni is that maybe for once you feel like you have quite a lot of agency to make your decisions, right? I guess people who take scholarships and bonds and things like that, it’s a little bit different. But I thought that it was quite a conscious choice that I felt was good. I spent a lot of time in uni kind of figuring out where I wanted to be eventually. I thought that it’s not so much that I hated the place. I don’t think I would have been happier had I stayed in Singapore. I think it was more of the fact that it kind of hit home that I didn’t really know where I was. I really, really wanted to be and that I felt as if regardless of where I went, it was the best internship, the best law job there, or whether it was the best one here, I felt like these things would still be going around in my mind. And that thought kind of made me miss coming home. It made me want to feel a little bit more grounded. And I think by the time I went home, that was when, actually in the middle of COVID. So that was very premature. And then there was a point where I also decided I want to study medicine.

Faith
Yes, we should save that story for another day.

Isaac
Yes, and I think we’ve touched on it before, very briefly in our first episode. but I think by the time I came back, I just really, really wanted to take a 3am drive to KL and eat some kaya prata. So I wasn’t sad to come back, but I think it was the start of a new chapter. But for you, were there any milestones like that during uni where you felt like things went from good to bad? You went from hopeful to jaded or the other way around. you went from jaded and bored to, oh my god, I’m finally going to have two new letters in front of my name, or anything like that.

Faith
I think local med school is kind of more of an up and down, so you go in really excited, and then you realise, oh crap, you’re studying so much once again, you have not escaped the rat race, and you’re not getting the same uni experience as all your peers. Everyone else got to go on exchange programmes for half a year to some nice country, and their Instagram was filled with pretty pictures. The rest of us were just sitting at home, studying like we were in JC. And then before you hit the clinical years, you get excited. You’re like, okay, this is the next phase of my training and I’m going to become one step closer to being a legit doctor. And then once you hit the clinical years, you’re like, oh, dreads, it’s a bit not as fun as I thought it would be. It’s a grind. And then once you’re on M5, you’re like, okay, this is the final stretch. You feel excited once again and hopeful in what you could do for your career and the rest of your life.

Isaac
And the rest is history after that, right? Yes.

Faith
Yeah. So do you feel like your overseas experience has given you a different perspective since coming back to Singapore? Like how you meet situations, how you practice as a doctor and what you feel success looks like?

Isaac
I think it’s had a really big influence on all of them. I wouldn’t necessarily call it due to the fact that I was abroad per se, but I think that whole part of my education in life in totality had a very big impact on the way that, let’s go one by one, I guess. The way I see the world, I think that when you’re younger in GC, secondary school and all that, partially maturity, partially the system, you always feel like there’s, life is just one or two metrics of success, right? You only have two jobs as a 15-year-old. You do well in your CCA, you do well in your exams, right? And I think uni itself, regardless of where it’s at, it kind of shakes up that balance for you a little bit, right? And you start thinking about other things. You think, what will my life as an adult look like? You, for the first time, don’t have eight hours of lectures every single day, or I mean classes, but then you start planning your schedule. Do I want to spend more time just eating lunch with my friends and watching the afternoon go by? Do I want to have strawberry and wine at 3pm in the afternoon? Or do I want to mug a little bit more today? Do I want to go for that open day or for that internship and take a one-hour train ride away? or do I want to just leave there for the next weekend while I go to Amsterdam and find my friend, right? So I think that kind of loosened up a lot of the self-imposed limitations and metrics that we probably had when we were much younger. And you start feeling a lot more agency over how you want to plan your life out. And I think now when I came after many years on from that experience, I think I still take that same sense of trying to add order to the chaos with the things I do every day. I think the way I plan my schedule now is a lot more akin to what I did for myself in uni than all the years before that. I think the second bit is how does success look like and how we think of other people and careers and things like that. And I think uni really helps you. I’m not sure you can… I’d love to hear your thoughts about the friends that were around you as well. But I thought that it made me realise that there were a lot of brands of success, right? There were people who were incredibly privileged, right? They’re there just to go back to their family dynasty in some Southeast Asian country somewhere. There are some people who are really, really, you know, it’s either do or die. That’s like uni is the one thing standing between their family and the poverty line and their scholarship. That kind of thing, right? And those are from another set of countries. And then there are some people who are just chilling, finding themselves. There are some people who suddenly decide that I don’t want to be a lawyer, I want to be an influencer. And it just goes from there, right? And then it makes you realise that life is kind of, there’s many ways you permutate things. You can try everything, maybe not all at once, but walk your own path after. And I think finally, the idea of medical practice, I think it made me a lot more, together with other experiences, open to what different people’s different priorities might be. I think in daily clinical practice, you meet people who are from all walks of life. They might make decisions that you don’t always agree with personally. They might look at you in a way that other people don’t normally look at you, whether that’s good or bad, whether that’s good or bad, a lot of both. And then you just learn to see that, okay, there’s probably something different. I probably don’t understand it, but it’s not my place to decide whether that’s good for you or not good for you. So that’s my long answer to your short question.

Faith
Yeah, wow, that was very comprehensive.

Isaac
What about you? Do you think you left uni a very different person from when you started?

Faith
I think, I mean, uni, because I did, I mean, undergrad medicine versus post-grad medicine also shapes your world pretty differently. So in local medicine, everyone was quite heavily focused on, you know, just what they write after graduation, which was getting a residency and seeing how far they could climb within the fixed career ladder that had been positioned nicely there for us. Like everything was not about, you know, what options are there outside of residency and outside of hospital life. So I guess our perspective was not so narrow in a sense, but that was the more common perspective rather than being encouraged to explore things entirely different from medicine and entirely non-clinical. Yeah, so I do think that it took a while longer for me to be able to reframe my perspective. Yeah, and to not say unbrainwash myself from the idea that the only right way to succeed was to become a specialist, to train, to climb up higher within the hospital rungs. Yeah, but overall, I would say that I think I wish I had gone overseas to study and, you know, just had the freedom of getting to travel randomly to Morocco, lie under the stars. I think it’s a very formative experience that those of us who stayed in Singapore for our entire lives pretty much until now missed out on. But of course, it’s not to say that we can’t go out and get these experiences now that we have adult money and adult freedom. Yeah. So last question. If you could send your 18-year-old self anywhere for five years, all expenses paid, where would it be and why?

Isaac
There’s an answer that popped into my head.

Faith
Spill.

Isaac
I would send my 18-year-old self to China for five years.

Faith
Why?

Isaac
I think that, okay, first of all, so this is like putting on a different hat. Okay, so this is putting on the commercial hat. I think that there is much going on there that I wish I had learned or got to be a part of a lot earlier. I think language is one thing. There’s a lot to, it’s a very useful thing to learn more of. But I think other than that, at least in my recent trips to China, I felt as if there’s a really palpable dynamism to the place where, you talk to the bartender outside the restaurant, you talk to whoever you’re working with on a particular project, you talk to clients, you talk to anyone on the road, everyone is conversational, everyone is very self-starting, everyone is… And okay, this is not like a everyone, everyone, right? this is a lot of what you feel is that people are really really trying to be resourceful cover the future for themselves they have a very keen awareness for where they stand culturally you know there’s it’s not just a dichotomy between the haves and have nots people are very very aware of where on that spectrum they lie and you kind of you know that’s that I think an experience like that would have made me a lot more self-reflective as well where compared to you know a worldview where you know, I’m thinking, either you have an internship, we don’t have an internship, right? Like, I think I wish I had more of those conversations when I was younger. And also, yeah, I guess to be a, to be a part of all the amazing things that are now guiding our life, like Claude and AI, Deep Seek and whatever. Yeah,

Faith
You could’ve exited with a Unicorn.

Isaac
Yeah, maybe, maybe, and maybe, or maybe I’ll just be in a miserable 9-9-6 job. Well, who knows? What about you?

Faith
Hmm, I guess for me, I would still probably have wanted to get, undergraduate degree just because you know I’ve got the very Singaporean mindset of if you have no degree you’re not going to have any food to eat so I would probably have wanted to go to a liberal arts college in the US and maybe study journalism and on the side I would have wanted to live in LA so that I can you know be around the film industry maybe get a part-time job behind the scenes or just holding a lighting rig or something for a couple of hours it’s holding a retractor for like eight hours in the OT right yeah I feel like I would have wanted a chance to explore those creative pursuits while I was younger and in a you know a state of life where there’s less commitments and less desire to put down roots you know the just a chance to be free and explore and make mistakes and figure out what we want in life.

Isaac
Would you would you have wanted to be a part of Devil Wears Prada 2?

Faith
Well I would have loved to be an extra just walking around in the back yeah that would have been fun or you could have been in Legally Blonde.

Isaac
I feel like there’s a lot of these memories of and what-ifs that we entertain at that age that kind of continue to live in our heads. And maybe in many cases, we actually manage to live them out. Do you watch any medical shows when you’re younger? Do you ever imagine yourself going to med school and being Meredith Grey?

Faith
I think I watched a couple episodes of House and I was like, oh my, he’s not a very nice fellow. Maybe I don’t want to work for him.

Isaac
I’m pretty sure if anyone acted like House, they will lose their job. Yes, for sure.

Faith
So unprofessional sometimes.

Isaac
And I think I sort of picked up on something you said earlier as well, which was the idea of being free, being given space to go and things like that. What advice would you give a younger version of yourself or even the younger parallel universes of ourselves, saying out there about creating the experience for yourself even when the environment might not necessarily call for it. What would you have told yourself?

Faith
I think I would have told myself that I mean you have 24 hours a day if you sit down at home and just lie down and netflix or you know whine about life the day still ends and you’re still tired so just go out there live your life to the fullest do as many things as you want to do explore all the options right until the end until you really cannot give up on those rather than live life with the regret of not having tried at all.

Isaac
And another question, my last question that sprung to mind was, I’m going to play devil’s advocate here, right? There might be some people who look at what you did or what I did. I mean, we look at some other people this way as well, which is, this is, I would kill to be in your position, right? You could flip that around and say that there are many people who take a much longer route to get to the same place. There are people who to stay back a year, people who have to try and try again to get into a degree like that. And then it means that there’s added years, added frustrations, and you manage to get there as fast as one can possibly get there, actually, right? So what do you think? Yeah, what do you think? Do you think you choose one or the other at the end of the day? Honest.

Faith
Well, I like the freedom that my current lifestyle has, even though some people might think that I’ve squandered it by not choosing to specialize and just choosing to lead a more chill existence. But it’s okay. Different strokes for different folks. I would still choose this path all over again because I’m not really a huge risk taker. I know what I have now and I like it. I’ll hold on to it. Thank you very much. I mean, would you ever have thought that you end up in law and then met? Are you happy with this?

Isaac
And I asked myself the question every day.

Faith
Every day when you show up at work at 6am.

Isaac
And yeah, I feel like my whole sentiment towards this is quite similar to yours actually, because you feel a lot of reckoning with yourself throughout the whole process, right? For me, it’s like, I suppose, a contrasting emotion, which is that, yeah, you know, I’m taking so long to get here. It’s especially jarring when, you know, I see my friends who are, this is not all encompassing, but who are in the civil service or in corporate fields, be it banking, consulting, etc. Or in my old love, I wouldn’t call it love, law. And I guess they’re a little bit further along in their careers. It’s undeniable that when I was still a med student asking for people to give me cases to Clark, most of my friends would have received their first promotion or their first bonus, right? When I first turned to HO, house officer, most of my friends are maybe back from their first overseas posting or they are getting their second race or starting to look for a second job already, right? Yeah, and you always wonder, but I feel as if genuinely, and this is not just self-guess, I think, as much as we are, I think, quite good at that here in this field. I do feel as if I’d gone about things in a very direct way, I’d still have a lot of what-ifs. And whether this sounds very miserable or whether this is actually reassuring to myself, I tell myself that even on the most miserable day, I feel like the parallel universe would be worse. And all in all, this is somewhere where I think I can make peace with all the decisions and I have enough data points in my past to help me make peace.

Faith
Yeah, so I think that’s it for this episode. And in the next episode, we’ll be talking to a doctor who’s coming from the US. And we’ll be asking him whether where you train shapes the person you become and how you practice medicine.

Isaac
So thank you and see you next time.

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