Lars van Oostrum | Faces of FEB

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The Faculty of Economics and Business is a faculty with a great diversity of people who all have an impact, big or small, on science and society. But who are these people? Within ‘Faces of FEB’ we connect with different students, staff members and researchers of the faculty and give a little peek into their world. This month: Lars van Oostrum, student Econometrics and Operations Research and a top judo athlete in the Dutch national juniors team.

1. Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Lars van Oostrum, I am 20 years old and I am currently in my third year of the Econometrics & Operations Research Bachelor’s programme at FEB. Besides my studies, I am active as a top judo athlete in the Dutch national juniors team. This year, I won gold at the junior national championships and at the end of last year I took a bronze medal at the senior national championships.

2. What does an average day look like for you?

During the week, I will normally wake up at around 6:00/6:30, prepare and eat some food and then have a training session at either 7:45 or 8:15. This is either a physical training in the gym, a training focused on conditioning,  a technical judo session to improve my game/techniques, or 2 of these after each other.

After doing the training in the morning, I’ll head either to campus or home to work on my studies. At the moment, I am writing my thesis so I’ll choose to head home to work there a bit more often. When I have lectures or tutorials on campus, I’ll often try to go, but whenever there is for example a lecture at the same time as a training, I skip the lecture and cover the material in my own time.

At the end of the afternoon or the beginning of the evening, I normally have my second training of the day. This training is a so-called randori session, which is what we call sparring in judo. Here we do some conditioning work as well, but the focus is on the sparring rounds. This training session takes around 1,5-2 hours, mostly depending on the location and intensity in the context of my training plan. I normally do this session in Groningen or Veendam (approx. half an hour drive from the city), but I also do this type of training at the national training center in Papendal with the Dutch national team once a week, in order to have some different and more experienced training partners. After the evening training session, I’ll normally do some studying work again before my day is already over at around 22:00/23:00.

3. Combining study and top sport sounds challenging, do you still have time for friends, family and work?

Despite the busy schedule, I have the weekend off more often than not, since I do not go to a competition or training camp every week. Because of that, I often still have time left to spend with my family and friends most of the weekends, but I also have to catch up on study work often. Doing things as going out partying is more difficult, since I am quite frequently in preparation for a tournament from a couple weeks in advance onwards, in which it is important to recover sufficiently from the taxing training sessions (for which I will often need the whole weekend).

As for work,  I had a job during covid, which was manageable for me due to the decrease in training volume because of the restrictions. However, when the group training sessions were allowed again, I found it to be a bit too much to handle the combination of study, sport and work so I quit the work.

4. What are your goals and how do you plan to accomplish them?

At the moment, my main short term goal is to qualify for (and of course perform well at) the European Championships for juniors, which coincidentally is in The Hague this year. In the meantime, I am also aiming to wrap up my bachelor’s degree by the summer.

As for the long term, my aim is to perform at the highest level with the seniors in a couple of years. I’ll keep working hard to be at the big senior tournaments such as the World Championships and of course hopefully the Olympic Games in the future.