About me

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Youth

It was a beautiful day after the summer. The month of September was ending. A European Robin was singing his song. Everything was pointing out that this would be a great day. And it became a great day! At 28th of September 1982 I was born in Lüdenscheid. That's in Germany. What do you say? No, my father was not in the Belgian army (located in Germany). My mother was a teacher for the children of the soldiers over there. They had their own school where of course I also went to. I don't remember a lot of that time in Germany. I do remember making an igloo at the beginning of the winter which remained till the end of the winter. I remember living at a death end street, on top of the 'hill' next to the parallel street that went higher on. And our street parties with a big round beer tent. The smell of beer makes me think of that times. There was also an excellent Balkan restaurant where you could order a meat dish with a giant pineapple in the middle, surrounded by all kinds of meat and vegetables and French fries. At the age of seven I came back to Belgium.

		Added at 21/05/2012
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Education

From the 2nd till the 4th year of elementary school I went to a little school with a big play garden and some animals like a donkey. The 5th and 6th year I went to a larger school and I spent high school in still a larger school. My teenager days were exciting, funny and careless days. I loved going to school. I was a real buffoon and my grades proved this many times. But I never came in trouble and always passed the year. I took almost all courses in 'ASO': from Latin to Greek-Latin to Economics-Mathematics in 3th and 4th and finally to Science-Mathematics in 5th and 6th.

When I had to choose university, I couldn't make a choice. I had to choose between university and college (I'm not sure about the difference in other countries, but universities in Belgium have or had higher level education (only masters), colleges have or had lower level educations (just bachelors and some master degrees), between economics, mathematics, science, ... To keep as much options as possible, I've chosen Master of Applied Engineering. I liked this a lot. The choice for college was the right one at that time. I would have had no problem with the difficult theoretical university, but the more practical approach of college suited me better and motivated me more. There was a lot of math and sciences, my favourite courses. Or wait a minute. There was another favourite course: informatics. This was what I eventually specialised in. Circumstances made it difficult years, but I had rather good grades and finished without any problems. Then there was the question: go to work or go for another master diploma? Which masters were interesting? Two of them came to my attention: specialising in Artificial Intelligence in Leuven ('far' away) or a master in Business Economics in Ghent. I've chosen the last one. It couldn't be better! I only needed to attend a selection of courses of Applied Economics, so I saw it as the Applied Economics without the nasty side courses. A fun year and a masters diploma further it was time to search for a job.

		Added at 21/05/2012
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Work

After quite some time of looking around I started in education. First as helping hand on the administration, but quickly also as a teacher in adult education. Soon I also found a fulltime job as an analyst-programmer in Zwijnaarde, but I kept teaching after the hours. To have a good salary as a teacher and to have more job certainty, you need the proper diploma for education. So I replaced one evening of teaching with the necessary teaching courses. It was a very busy time: combining a fulltime job with teaching and getting the diploma. Busy but very interesting. The experience of my job could be passed to my students. Lots of practical assignments of the diploma could be done in my own school. And the courses for the teaching diploma gave me lots of background for my own lessons, but also for my other work. After almost three years it became too much. I quitted both jobs and aborted the studies to go looking for another job. I worked for about one year as a programmer in Sint-Niklaas. But I didn't like this job very well, so I quitted this one as well. I gave myself a short sabbatical to finish some projects: I finished the teaching courses, did some photo shoots, made this website, I started writing my book and the time table program came in an ending phase. After two and a half month I went back to work. Since that time I work as a teaching assistant at Ghent University, at the faculty of Economics and Business Administration at the department of Management Information and Operations Management. As a teaching assistant I spend 50% of my time at helping the professor (exercise sessions for students) and the other 50% I spent on my Ph.D. studies. I teach Excel, MySQL and Java. My research is about process mining. This is the generation or enrichment of process models (schemes) out of computer log files. More in detail I try to find a way to do this with multiple log files at once and find out which problems then occur.

		Added at 21/05/2012
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Hobbies

As a child I tried lots of activities: boy scouts, karate, music school, table tennis, drawing and gymnastics. After quite some years I didn't like scouts anymore and I searched for another youth association. That's how I ended up in JNM. It's an association for youth till 25 years old who are concerned with nature and environmental issues. That was my kind of thing. At the beginning I only joined for camps, but later on I worked for Bertram (the nature journal of JNM) and I was a member of the board for a while. It's a pity I had to quit the board early, because I then started my first fulltime job. In the mean while I'm over 25 years of age and I therefore can be no active member anymore. So since some years now I go as a volunteer to a camp of the Red Cross. They organise camps for poor children and children in difficult home situations. This made a huge impressions and now I do lots more as a volunteer (the camps, but also activities during the year, recruiting other volunteers, teaching to logistical helpers and selling stickers for my local department). The Red Cross also has a youth department and maybe I will join and help them to.

You would like more details or a handy overview? Please contact me at info janclaes.be and ask for my extended resume.

		Added at 21/05/2012
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