Early Life, Education and Work
Prince Friso was born in Utrecht as the second son of Queen Beatrix and the late Prince Claus of the Netherlands. His godparents are King Harald V of Norway, Johan Christian Baron von Jenisch, J.H. van Roijen, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and Christina von Amsberg. He has one elder brother, Willem-Alexander, Prince of Orange and one younger brother, Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands.
In 1988, he studied mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where he joined Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. From 1988 to 1994 he studied at Delft University of Technology, where he obtained an engineer's degree in aeronautical engineering. Additionally, he has an MSc degree in economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam. To prepare himself for the possibility of succession to the throne, he took courses in Dutch law and parliamentary history.
Prince Friso worked from 1995 until 1996 at the Amsterdam branch of the international management consultancy McKinsey. After completing an MBA-programme at INSEAD, Prince Friso worked as vice president from 1998 till 2003 for Goldman Sachs International in London. Since 2004 he is part-time co-president of TNO Space in Delft. As of October 2006, Prince Friso is Managing Director in the London office of the private investment and advisory firm Wolfensohn & Co (founded by James Wolfensohn, former President of the World Bank).
Prince Friso is a co-founder of the MRI Centre in Amsterdam and is also a founding shareholder of Wizzair, the largest low-cost airline in Eastern Europe. Prince Friso is honorary chairman of the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development (a position he holds together with his younger brother Prince Constantijn). The Prince also serves as a director and supervisory director of various companies.
Prior to his accident, Prince Friso was working as a Chief Financial Officer for URENCO, a uranium enrichment company that has its main offices in Stoke Poges, Berkshire, UK, and plants in the Netherlands, Germany, Capenhurst, UK, and New Mexico in the US. Prince Friso was taking care of all four plants.
Read more about this topic: Prince Friso Of Orange-Nassau
Famous quotes containing the words early, education and/or work:
“In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued endless consequences.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“Until we devise means of discovering workers who are temperamentally irked by monotony it will be well to take for granted that the majority of human beings cannot safely be regimented at work without relief in the form of education and recreation and pleasant surroundings.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)