Kzamm

Curriculum vitæ

I am Peter Orosz, a Doctor of Medicine working as a writer and occasional videographer, based in Budapest, Hungary. Currently, I’m crazy Euro car boy at Gawker Media’s car blog Jalopnik, the editor of Hyperleggera, a car blog that’s not a car blog, and the designer and photographer of food comics at PresenTense Magazine.

This page lists in much detail my work experience and my education. If you need an overview, get it here in plain text or click here for a PDF to print.

Previously, I wrote and presented feature videos for a leading Hungarian online video portal and was founding editor of Hungary’s most popular car blog. Prior to that, I held positions of business development, video game design, scientific assistance and database management. I have yet to try my hand at insect extermination.

I was born in Szeged, Hungary, and raised in Hungary and the Eastern United States. After specializing in biology and chemistry in high school, I earned an M.D. from Semmelweis University.

References are available upon request, alternatively contact the companies listed.

Work experience

Director of Community at Index Video

March 2008 – January 2009

Marking the third act of my extended cooperation with Mr. Bazsó, I joined his new company with the intent to create Mars forgatni, a blog about DIY videomaking. After a long gestation period, the blog was launched in August 2008 and in spite of a promising beginning and a gorgeous design, it never lived up to its full potential. This was probably due to the site’s ludicrously wide scope. However, editing Mars forgatni was an excellent lesson in focus, or, in this case, the lack thereof.

Apart from my blogging duties, I wrote and presented feature videos, the most notable of which was about the genetics of osteoporosis. I also co-hosted an experimental live talk show which ran for 13 hours straight and covered the night of the 2008 US Presidential election.

Director of Community at Totalcar

February 2007 – February 2008

My second and last job at Totalcar grew out of an experiment that began in December 2005. As an aside to Totalcar’s mix of road tests, industry news and car tips, I began writing short pieces about car culture, interpreted as widely as possible. The pieces became the blog Belsőség, which was officially launched as a separate brand in August 2006. Writing and editing the blog became my full-time occupation in February 2007. From an early readership of a couple hundred per day, Belsőség rocketed into prominence and quickly became Totalcar’s most rapidly growing asset, developing a cult following from Hungary’s car nerds. At its peak in January 2008, it was read by 18,000 people a day—that is, 1.2‰ of the world’s entire population of Hungarian speakers.

I wrote a total of 1,165 posts for Belsőség over the 18 months of my editorship. If you read Hungarian, you can access them at this link. In early February 2008, after disagreements with Totalcar’s then-new management, I was let go as editor.

Over the course of my 2+ years at Totalcar, I also wrote a number of feature articles and produced a dozen or so videos.

Director of Business Development at Totalcar

October 2005 – January 2007

A dream job in the making, this. After years of spending most waking hours devouring everything written, photographed and shot about cars, I met Gábor Bazsó, the co-host of Totalcar, a wildly creative and quirky motoring weekly at Hungarian commercial broadcaster TV2. Gábor also happened to be the managing director of the online motoring magazine by the same name and he hired me to oversee and execute strategic sponsorship deals. Which is just a fancy way to say that I would more or less continue where I’d left off at E-spell with the important distinction that the product I’d be selling was motoring journalism instead of language services.

I turned out to be a rather ineffective director of business development. Over the months, I became increasingly involved in creating instead of selling Totalcar. Apart from feature articles, I started a car blog within Totalcar by the name of Belsőség, which quietly consumed all my time spent with directing the development of business. In January 2007, writing and editing Belsőség became my full-time occupation.

Division Manager at E-Spell Translation Agency

January 2005 – September 2005

Apart from a final exam and minor administative duties, I concluded my studies at Semmelweis University in August 2004. Four hard months of trying to figure out just what exactly I should do with my 24 years and a medical diploma followed. A late night call from my friend Miklós Bán changed all that. Miklós, founder and managing director of a high-end translation startup, let me in on his idea to focus his company into four technical divisions, headed by people intimate with both the field and the realities of a technical service company. In the case of E-Spell Medical, that person was me.

I dusted off my sales skills and went to work on building the division. I was quite successful when it came to selling leaders of medical and biotech startups on the merits of a translation agency with a slate of qualified medical translators. It probably didn’t hurt that I happened to speak their language, as opposed to most language services people with backgrounds in liberal arts.

In addition to leading sales, I also helped in locating and selecting for our professional database skilled medical translators and interpreters.

Unfortunately, a life of salesmanship does not come to me naturally. As deals started maturing, I found myself losing interest and spending an increasing amount of time with a hobby which had come into bloom at this point: cars.

After nine months, I left E-Spell to begin a new life as a motoring journalist.

Scientific Assistant at Mindentudás Egyeteme

August 2002 – November 2004

Mindentudás Egyeteme is a weekly series of popular science presentations given by leading Hungarian scientists. It was launched in the summer of 2002 by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Magyar Telekom, the local subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.

I was signed on at launch for the scientific assistant team: people with an understanding of both science and media. I was responsible for presentations dealing with natural sciences and my main job was to bridge the gap between professors and media people, being comfortable in the company of both. I prepared slides, managed media assets, produced and arranged the production of visuals, and during the actual presentations, served as the link between the presenter and the technical staff.

Over the course of two years, I assisted eleven Hungarian professors in their efforts to give great talks. I left Mindentudás Egyeteme after Semester 5 to take a job in the language services industry.

Video Game Designer at IAV Kronologix

March 2003 – June 2003

For a kid who had played video games all his life and had at one point considered making one, a late night call about a job as a video game designer sounds just about the coolest thing ever. And it was indeed the coolest thing ever! I passed my interview with flying colors only to realize that the game I had been assigned to design was in a genre as far from my beloved first-person shooters and weird adventure games as you can get: a dreary management simulator, in this case, Airport Tycoon 3. I quickly realized that playing countless hours of Quake does not qualify me to design a game for people who prefer their entertainment to feel remarkably like Microsoft Excel. After two months, I was relieved of my suffering to become a beta tester for the company’s other titles. I was not a very good beta tester and after my initial three months were up, I was let go and returned to finish my last year at medical school.

Quality Assurance Tester at Encorus Technologies

October 2002 – December 2002

A very weird part-time job I took as I began my second to last year at medical school. Encorus was a company that developed e-payment systems for mobile phone companies and I was part of a team that was tasked with performing sets of regression testing protocols on their new system currently in development. The problem was that a typical weekly workload amounted to about two hours of work and for the rest of the time, we were paid to sit around and do nothing. After this horrible state of inefficiency reached company headquarters in Germany, the whole team was let go, putting an abrupt end to my blossoming career in databases. I returned to school to study forensic pathology and surgery.

Data Curator at Alternative Medicine Foundation

July 2000 – June 2002

I traveled to the US after passing my first major final exams to begin my favorite side job ever. I was hired by Jackie Wootton, the wife of my former supervisor at NIH, to become the resident geek at her foundation. I spent the next two years working online from Budapest when medical school was in and taking a plane to Washington, D.C. when school was out to spend the summers in Bethesda, Maryland. At the foundation, I oversaw the transfer of HerbMed, an online herbal resource, from its humble beginnings as a collection of HTML pages into a proper content management system. When on location, I was also responsible for maintaining the foundation’s computers and for a brief spell, I was even required to manage the work of an assistant.

As the dotcom crisis wriggled its way into the nonprofit sector, the foundation ran short of funds and Jackie had no choice but let me go. I returned full-time to medical school.

Education

Doctor of Medicine from Semmelweis University

February 2005

I began my medical studies in September 1998 at Albert Szent-Györgyi Medical University, which later became the medical center of newly formed University of Szeged. In 2000, I moved to Budapest to continue my studies at Semmelweis University. I concluded my studies in January 2005 and received my diploma in 2005. My thesis was on the respiratory manifestations of gastroesophageal reflux disease.

Special Volunteer at National Center for Biotechnology Information

July 1998 – August 1998

Between my high school years and medical school, I spent two months at NIH under John Wootton, who taught me a few things about bioinformatics. I was given a computer and a database of proteins and left to learn about pattern recognition on 3D models of proteins. It was great fun.

English-Hungarian Bilingual Diploma from Török Ignác High School

June 1998

My high school was in the suburbs of Budapest. I studied in a bilingual program in which natural and social sciences were taught in English and I had a large number of English classes held by native speakers from the United States. I specialized in chemistry and biology, wrote a lot of bad poetry and organized an intra-school soccer championship which, unlike similar ventures, was designed and led with care. I graduated in the summer of 1998 and went on to study medicine.

Elementary school

Of note is grade seven which I attended at Julius West Middle School in Rockville, Maryland. This has contributed in a huge way to my command of the English—or, as some would say, the American—language.