Left to Right - Dad, Me, Grandpa, Mom, Sister (June 1997)

1979 I'm born somewhere on Long Island. Where? Your guess is as good as mine without looking at my birth certificate.
1982 Tired of having to drive everywhere, I leave my suburban life behind and move to Brooklyn at the tender age of 3.
1986 I watch the Mets win the World Series on TV with my mom on the fold out couch. I sleep through class the next day. Lesson learned: the Mets are way more important than 2nd grade.
1993 I enroll in Stuyvesant HS, the one school in America where the chess team has more groupies than the baseball and basketball teams combined. I score two varsity letters and no groupies.
1995 I meet Mimi in Woodshop and am struck by her intelligence, humor, and beauty. She later remembers me as “the other guy” at the table.
1997 I enroll at NYU and plan to study math. One intensive calculus class taught by an English-challenged adjunct later I am a psychology major.
1998 I take my psych-stats knowledge on the road and run analyses for the training group at American Express – my first job in the field of organizational psychology.
2002 I decide to pursue a Ph.D. in Social-Organization Psychology. I enroll in Teachers College, Columbia University to study with Dr. W. Warner Burke. Man, this seems like a lifetime ago.
2004 I join Pfizer’s Learning and Development department to help analyze training outcomes. I love the people and the work is interesting, but the liberal in me keeps screaming, “You’re working for Big Pharma?!”
2005 I leave Pfizer to work with my colleagues and dear friends at C Global. I learn what it means to have partners, and I couldn’t ask for better ones than those I found at C Global.
2006 Endy Chavez saves the game with the most amazing catch you will ever see, the Mets can’t push across a run the next inning with the bases loaded, Aaron Heilman serves up a gopher ball I swore was a pop fly to left, Beltran watches strike three go by, and I watch as my mom tears up in the upper tank at Shea Stadium. This is the last game I ever went to with my mom.
2007 January: I rediscover my love for teaching after taking a position as a statistics instructor for undergraduate psychology students at Hunter College.
April: I have to let my mother go. Easily the hardest thing I have ever had to do, though there is a heartbreaking beauty in the chance to show her how much I love her and how far I would go to care for her before she leaves.
August: I co-found my first startup, LeaderNation, and dream big dreams.
2008 June: I find a love I never knew before when, a scant 13 years after I make my move in Woodshop, Mimi agrees to go on a date with me.
August: I say goodbye to the man who raised me like a son, my grandfather. Once again I am heartbroken, yet grateful for the opportunity to give back to the people who made me everything I am.
2009 I start teaching in the M.S. in I/O Psychology program at Baruch College. I really love the students and the administration trusts me to create my own classes. I'm a pig in, well, you know.
2011 Mimi and I enter into a domestic partnership. I learn for a second time what it means to have a partner. This time it is a partner in life, and I am supremely content.
2012 I make the difficult decision to say goodbye to my partners at C Global who have become family to me. Bursting with excitement, I launch my own consulting company, and JoaquinRoca.com, to focus on scaling NY startups.