Itai Axelrod
Veterinary Student · Semester 9 of 11 · UniVet Budapest
Emergency & Critical Care · Small Animal
Thirty days in a referral ICU, 108 hours on the wards, and twelve cases written up. Outside the clinic I build the tools that take the repetition out of the work.
Emergency medicine, and the systems around it
I'm in semester 9 of the 11-semester DVM programme at the University of Veterinary Medicine Budapest (UniVet), studying in English. Israeli, based in Budapest. The programme runs from basic sciences through full clinical rotations — small animal, equine, farm animal, surgery and emergency.
The part I keep going back to is intensive care. The 108 hours I put in on voluntary overnight and weekend shifts in the university hospital's internal medicine ward and ICU taught me more than any lecture block — and a 30-day externship at a referral centre confirmed it.
Outside the clinic I build things — automation scripts, native Mac and iOS apps, my own home network. It's the same instinct either way: find the step that's wasting everyone's time, and rebuild it.
Time in the clinic
30-Day ICU Externship
Emergency and specialty referral centre, Israel. Rotated through ICU, oncology, neurology, dermatology, internal medicine, dentistry and surgery. Twelve cases written up.
Internal Medicine & ICU shifts
Required clinical rotation in systematic diagnostic approach, case workup and laboratory interpretation — plus 108 hours of voluntary overnight and weekend shifts in the Small Animal Hospital's internal medicine ward and ICU: hospitalised patient monitoring, treatment administration, IV catheter and infusion care, oxygen therapy, and owner communication within student scope. Counted toward the internal medicine final examination.
Mobile Clinic Rotation
Required field rotation in the UniVet Budapest curriculum — house calls, farm visits and community cases outside the university clinic. Independent clinical decision-making and owner communication in uncontrolled environments.
What I bring beyond the clinical work
Knowledge & study systems
Built a pipeline that sorts my recorded lectures and course materials by subject and loads them into NotebookLM as structured sources, so answers stay anchored to university material. I've helped classmates set up the same thing.
Scope: study, revision and admin only — never clinical decision-making, diagnosis or treatment planning.
Scripting & automation
Python and shell automation for the repetitive parts — batch data processing, file and record handling, anything that is the same twelve keystrokes every time.
Practice IT, practically
I run my own network end to end — segmentation, DNS, backups, remote access. In a small practice that translates to working Wi-Fi, backups that actually restore, and not needing to call someone in for every problem.
Native app development
macOS and iOS apps in Swift and SwiftUI, built outside coursework: a home-lab dashboard, a media toolkit wrapping ffmpeg, and a native player written to replace a slower Electron one.
Let's talk
If you run an externship, a referral service, or a practice that could use an extra pair of hands — I'd like to hear from you.