Identical twins graduate as doctors on same day

Identical twins Sanumi and Sanuthi Ranasinghe have known they would be surgeons for as long as they can remember.

The bubbly pair typically finish each other’s sentences and then erupt into giggles.

“We had a phone book at home in Colombo, and I had written on it ‘Surgeon Sanumi’, and then…”

“I had written underneath, ‘Surgeon Sanuthi’. That was one of the first things I had written when I picked up my pen.”

When they moved to Aotearoa, New Zealand at the age of ten, their mother brought the phonebook out and they looked at it shortly before the twins graduated from Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland on 9 December.

They have valued each other’s support through the tough six years of medical training, including finding they were on the same placements in the last three years.

They went to Melbourne for their selective and followed their shared interest in plastic surgery to the same hospital.

There were mix-ups.

“When we were in Melbourne, we were switching back and forth between these two hospital campuses every week. So they thought we were the same person,” Sanumi says.

Sanuthi picks up the story: “So they're like, ‘remember what I told you last week?’ I was like, ‘No, I wasn't there. I don't remember.’”

This year, 2025, Sanuthi says there was a funny moment where a consultant on Sanumi’s team took everyone’s coffee orders then surprised Sanuthi by giving her Sanumi’s coffee.

“I was really confused as to why he was giving me free coffee. I had to explain that I was a twin.”

As children, they enjoyed crafts, which contributed to their interest in surgery.
This year – they both went to London for a surgery elective at Hammersmith Hospital.

Sanuthi says, “It was nice working alongside Sanumi, because she was on one side of the theatre table and I was on the other side, suturing on one side and she was doing the other side. It was a unique experience we will probably never experience again.”

Less funny was having to deal with missing grades and assessments, when administrators assumed there was a typo and sent only one email.

All was sorted though the and the good experiences far outweighed the bad.

There were rare experiences of racism at school on Auckland’s North Shore and in the hospital system, too, but the twins were robust.

“I remember a day at school very clearly when one of the teachers said that we couldn't get into medical school and I couldn't get into an extension class,” says Sanumi. “That was very discouraging, but I just thought to myself, ‘I'm going to prove them wrong.’”

Their commitment to medicine has been cemented during study by health issues in their family.

Now that they are graduating, the pair are looking forward to taking different paths and developing individual personalities.

“We've been through a lot, but despite all of this, we are very grateful to have been able to complete six years of medical school together,” says Sanumi.