What made the decision harder for his parents to grasp was his choice to pursue video production work. For them, it was not just about the prestige of medicine but also rejecting an iron rice bowl.
His Singaporean father was an entrepreneur with mixed success and his mother was a piano teacher from Slonim, a town in the eastern European country of Belarus. The second of four children, Mr Low grew up in rented homes with his family.
When it became clear that he wouldn’t budge, his relationship with his parents cooled. They lived apart, with Mr Low sleeping in a studio space he rented.
“There was a period of silence, where we contacted each other only every now and then,” Mr Low said, lowering his gaze.
In the meantime, leaving medical school meant that he needed to find a way to pay the penalty.
THE GOLDEN BOY
Until then, Mr Low was – by conventional metrics – the golden boy of the family. Motivated by the idea of supporting those around him, he was a leader from a young age in various co-curricular activities in school, culminating in his becoming student council president at National Junior College.
“I’d say I had a bit of a saviour complex,” Mr Low laughingly recalled. “I’ve always wanted to help everybody.”
It was this spirit that led him, after guidance from his parents and those around him, to settle on medicine as a career initially.
“It’s a noble profession,” Mr Low said. “I liked the idea very much of helping people who are sick.”
After gaining admission into NUS Medicine, he was awarded the NUS Merit Scholarship upon beginning his studies in 2016. The scholarship fully paid for his university tuition, although it did not exempt him from the five-year bond with Singapore’s public healthcare sector.
He excelled in his academic pursuits while taking on extracurricular activities such as leading his team to victory at innovation competitions. He became the president of the Asian Medical Students’ Association Singapore, representing all Singapore medical school students at home and internationally.
It was while he was in the thick of these activities that he began to question a future in medicine.
As with most medical students, he had a general idea of how demanding it is to be a doctor. However, experiencing it firsthand was a different beast.
