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Episode 11: What It’s Really Like Studying Medicine at Universiti Malaya
When Xiao Yue was in high school, she thought she wanted to go into politics. Then she considered law, biomedical science and eventually medicine. In this episode of We Didn’t Plan This, we sit down with Xiao Yue, a second-year medical student at Universiti Malaya, to hear how she ended up choosing medicine and what…
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Episode 10: Moving to Singapore as a Malaysian Doctor – What You Need to Know
What is it actually like to be a doctor in Singapore? In this episode, Faith and Isaac sit down with Xiao Yue, a Malaysian medical student, for an honest conversation about life in medicine across the Causeway. We talk about the culture shock of entering the medical workforce, navigating the very specific hierarchy of house…
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Episode 9: Escaping Singapore’s Comparison Checklist – Promotion, BTO, Kids by 30?
We’re both about to turn 30, and honestly? Neither of us feels like we have it figured out. In this episode, we get into what we each thought adulthood would look like as kids — the house, the marriage, the “settled” career — and how differently things actually turned out. Spoiler: neither of us is…
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Episode 8: An Anaesthesiologist Gets Real on Biohacking, Burnout & Interventional Pain In Veterans
In this second part of our conversation with interventional pain specialist Dr Ruan Qing Zhao, we step outside the hospital and into everything that happens around it — the marriage that keeps him grounded, the home-cooked feasts, and the spontaneous decision to sign up for Hyrox. We geek out over VO2 max, and why it…
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Episode 7: A Singaporean Doctor’s Path to A Harvard Anaesthesiology Residency
Faith and Isaac sit down with Dr Qing Zhao, a Singaporean who took the well-worn “study hard, serve, come home” script and quietly rewrote it. What started as a choice between NUS and a scholarship-free gamble on UCL turned into a decade-long odyssey across the UK and US healthcare systems — three attempts at US…
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Episode 6: Cambridge Law vs Singapore Medical School – Our Wildly Different University Experiences
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…
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Episode 5: Optimism Bias – Is Believing in Yourself a Bug or a Feature?
Faith and Isaac get into the psychology of optimism bias — why we consistently believe we can handle more than we actually can, and whether that’s a feature or a flaw. From personal stories about over-committing during med school to patients who stop their meds the moment things look up, this episode is a candid,…
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Episode 4: From Cadaver Lab to Breaking Bad News – What Medical Training Teaches You
Faith and Isaac talk about what medical training genuinely does to you emotionally — starting from the cadaver lab, through the weight of breaking bad news, navigating dark humour with colleagues, and whether all of it bleeds into who you become outside the hospital.
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Episode 3: Two Doctors Questioning The Singaporean Dream
Somewhere between a therapy session and a sparring match, this episode has Faith and Isaac putting each other on the spot with questions they actually want answered. No guest, no agenda — just two doctors who’ve both strayed pretty far from the expected path, asking each other the hard stuff: Was there a moment you…
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Episode 2: The Script We Didn’t Write
Faith and Isaac spend this episode doing something they probably should have done years ago — actually tracing back where their paths came from. Not the polished CV version, but the real one. The one that starts with Faith wanting to be a paleontologist, and Isaac presenting a Minister of Health flip chart at kindergarten,…
We Didn't Plan This | Podcast By Two Side-Questing Doctors
The Podcast for People Who Ditched Their Five-Year Plan
