Fort Collins, Colorado
Ten years of software. Now, medicine.
I'm Eric Holland — a first-year osteopathic medical student (OMS-I) at the University of Northern Colorado College of Osteopathic Medicine, after a decade as a software engineer. I'm aiming for interventional radiology. This site is where I keep my study tools, notes, and the occasional essay about the switch.
Background
The two tracks started together. At California State University, San Bernardino I double-majored in Computer Science and Biology (pre-med) — writing code in one building and handling reptiles in the other. When I graduated, software was the door that opened first, so I walked through it.
I spent the next ten years building software professionally — mostly .NET on the back end and whatever the front end needed that year. I shipped products, led projects, debugged production at 2 a.m., and learned that the part of the job I loved most was the diagnostic loop: a system misbehaves, you reason from symptoms to cause, and you fix it. The biology half never went quiet, though. Medicine is the same loop applied to people, and it is the only thing I found more compelling than engineering.
So I went back. I earned a Master of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Northern Colorado to get my science current and prove to myself the switch was real, and then matriculated at UNC's College of Osteopathic Medicine in Greeley.
Left: undergrad biology at CSUSB. Middle and right: UNC College of Osteopathic Medicine, 2026.
Why osteopathic
The DO philosophy — that structure and function are interrelated, that the body is a unit, and that the musculoskeletal system deserves a hands-on examination — matched how I already thought about complex systems. Nothing fails in isolation. You have to look at the whole thing.
Where I'm headed
Interventional radiology. Imaging as live telemetry, catheters and wires as instruments, and procedures that treat disease through a pinhole. It is the specialty where an engineer's habits translate most directly, and where I'd like to spend a career.
What's here
Interactive learning
Click-through modules with diagrams and scoring. Anatomy — dermatomes, myotomes, the brachial plexus, muscles, arteries, lesion localization — and metabolism: every FMK pathway as a clickable map, lysosomal storage diseases, and clinical reasoning cases.
Start → ResourcesNotes & files
PDFs, diagrams, and links I've collected or made, organized by subject.
Browse → Blog & FAQWriting
Essays on the career change, review FAQs after each block, and whatever else needs writing down.
Read →