Why a software engineer went to medical school

For about a decade I built software for a living — web apps, back-end services, the unglamorous plumbing that keeps a business running. I liked it. I was good at it. And somewhere along the way I realized the problems I found myself reading about at night were not software problems.

The itch

Engineering teaches you to love a certain kind of problem: a system with rules, a fault somewhere inside it, and the satisfaction of tracing the fault to its source. Medicine, it turns out, is the same discipline pointed at a much older and much more interesting machine. A patient presents with a constellation of findings; you localize the lesion; you intervene. The debugger is just a lot more expensive.

Why osteopathic

The osteopathic philosophy — treating the person, not the chart, and taking the musculoskeletal system seriously as a window into the rest of the body — matched how I already thought about complex systems. Nothing fails in isolation. You have to look at the whole thing.

Why interventional radiology

IR is the specialty where an engineer's instincts pay off most directly: imaging as real-time telemetry, catheters and wires as tooling, procedures that are essentially minimally-invasive debugging of the vascular system. It is where I want to end up. Ask me again in four years.

This site

This site is part portfolio, part study notebook. The Learn section holds the interactive modules I build to drill anatomy — dermatomes, myotomes, the brachial plexus — and the Resources page collects the notes and files I would have wanted on day one. If any of it helps another student, even better.