Jan van Os

摘要

DOUGLAS R. KELLY: Jan, we'll start right at the beginning. Where and when were you born? JAN VAN OS: I was born in the Netherlands, in a place called IJsselstein on the 11th of October 1964. IJsselstein is a small town in the middle of the Netherlands. KELLY: As a child, did you have an interest in boats and the sea? VAN OS: No, not at all. My family came from furniture manufacturing. My father had his own company in manufacturing couches and tables, etc., so I was raised in a completely different environment than shipbuilding or sailing or whatever. It's a rather odd story that I ended up in shipbuilding, but you know how things are going when you are growing up...the first thing I wanted to become was a doctor. That was my first thing, I suppose, my dream when I was young, but I'm not good with blood. [Laughter] At a certain moment I realized, "Oh, blood is not my thing and I'm also color-blind, so being a doctor is not for me." And I'm technical, so then you're thinking about becoming an architect or going to study aerospace technology. At a certain moment during high school when you have to choose your profession, I already knew that I wanted to do something [with] technical study. At that time, you are looking at all kinds of studies and at a certain moment during those days, at my high school, somebody from naval architecture [came and spoke to us]. He told such an appealing story about shipbuilding that it caught me, and I said, "Hey, that's what I want to do." It's technical, it's such a beautiful product with mechanical [elements], with shipbuilding, with electrical, with all these dynamic things in it. It's also an industry which was, at that time, still quite big in the Netherlands, so it was also a really Dutch industry. That story got me, and that's how I started studying naval architecture.