Faith and Isaac compare their wildly different university paths — NUS Medicine vs Cambridge Law — and unpack culture shock, missed local uni experiences, and whether they'd choose the same road again.

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. Faith 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.

Keywords: NUS Medicine, Cambridge Law, Singapore university life, medical school Singapore, studying abroad Singapore, university culture shock, career regrets, Singapore meritocracy, doctor career path, law school experience

We Didn't Plan This started because Faith and Isaac have a lot of feelings about life not going according to plan. This episode is probably the most honest that's looked so far. The topic: optimism bias — that very human tendency to believe we'll be the exception, that this time we can handle it, that the numbers will somehow stay good if we just quietly stop taking the meds. It sounds like a psychology lecture. It isn't. It's two doctors sitting across from each other asking: on a scale of one to ten, how much of a sucker for suffering are you, really?

The conversation takes a few unexpected turns. Isaac talks about the period during med school where he was simultaneously doing weekend relief teaching, one-to-one tutoring, and working as an overnight caregiver through a home care app — wiping floors at strangers' houses at 2am and heading back to hospital the next morning. Faith talks about starting her blog not out of optimism, but almost the opposite: a need to warn people what they were getting into. And then how, slowly, writing about hard things in a hopeful tone actually rewired the way she processed them.

They banter about on-call stress eating (including carbonara for supper in hospital), and the witching hour between 4 and 5am where all bets are off. But the thread running through all of it is the same question: is optimism something that happens to you, or something you choose? And if you could calibrate yours up or down — would you?

⏳Chapters

0:00 – Intro + optimism bias

0:25 – How optimistic are we?

3:19 – Ambition vs optimism vs just needing the money

5:02 – Isaac's med school hustle era

7:57 – What one night of nursing work does to an aspiring doctor

10:00 – Why faith started a blog (it wasn't really about optimism)

18:21 – Writing as a way of rewiring how you feel

21:06 – The things we always underestimate (time, sleep, emotional bandwidth)

25:25 – Becoming a freelance doctor and regaining optimism

26:45 – Does surviving hard things make you more or less hopeful?

27:09 – Pain caves, canoeing sprints, and the resilience mindset

29:59 – On-call coping + 5am carbonara

31:12 – Optimism bias in medicine: when patients go rogue

35:02 – What are we optimistic about right now?

36:59 – Would we calibrate our optimism up or down?

We started medical school by walking into a room with donated human bodies and a scalpel. And if you ask most doctors about it now, years later, there's this thing that happens — the memory is still vivid, but the weight of it has somehow… shifted. This episode is about that shift.

Faith and Isaac talk through what cadaver lab was actually like — the smell, the pledge, the strange intimacy of returning to the same silent mentor week after week. But what starts in that room doesn't stay there. From the first time you realise you're treating someone's worst day like a Tuesday, to the 4am calls where you have to find enough human warmth to deliver devastating news on barely any sleep — the emotional recalibration that comes with working in medicine is something nobody really prepares you for.

They get into patients rejecting life-saving dialysis, dark humour as a coping mechanism, what it means to "pace" with a dying patient's family, and what the best and worst examples of clinical communication have taught them about who they want to become.

By the end of it, the question isn't really whether doctors are desensitised. It's whether some version of that numbness is necessary — and whether, if you're honest with yourself, it's started showing up in places it probably shouldn't.

⏳Chapters

0:00 - Intro & what this episode is about

0:58 - What actually happens in cadaver lab (for non-medical viewers)

2:45 - Our first day: the pledge, the white coats, and the moment the bodies were unveiled

5:00 - The difference between Faith's experience and Isaac's (dissecting vs. observing)

6:20 - Developing a "relationship" with your silent mentor over weeks

7:05 - How that emotional weight slowly evolves as you start seeing real patients

9:45 - The first time you start feeling like you're becoming someone you don't like

12:00 - Dialysis, difficult conversations, and learning what pacing with patients means

15:00 - The overnight call that made it feel real: a stroke patient our own age

16:00 - Processing heavier conversations — and why 10 seconds is sometimes all you get

18:45 - Did med school actually prepare us for any of this?

22:30 - Staying up overnight to practice breaking bad news at 5am (our proposal to faculty)

24:00 - Desensitisation and colleagues: dark humour, "rocks," and what outsiders don't get

26:00 - Code-switching: from hospital to real life (and the velvet glove problem)

27:30 - When a senior doctor loses it — and what that taught us about who we want to be

30:10 - How numb are we, really? (Isaac's answer: 80%)

32:00 - "Microdosing emotion": what the best seniors actually do

34:00 - SBAR: when clinical communication becomes your default personality

36:00 - Does the numbness follow you home? The paternalism trap

37:00 - Patient stories that stuck: the man who refused dialysis

38:30 - The "pleasantly confused" auntie who gave us Korean hearts — and then didn't make it

41:00 - Closing thoughts: striking the balance between empathy and function