Describe a moment when you realized HES had changed your career path.
I came to Harvard Extension School with 24 years of experience in financial services, including 14 years at Citi, where I spent most of my career climbing the corporate ladder to director. I expected the program to add a credential to a career I had already built. What I did not expect was that my time at HES would quietly redraw the map.
Course by course, I began to see the work I had done throughout my career through a new lens. Two decades in financial services had taught me to understand organizations through the systems that keep them running. My industrial-organizational psychology courses at HES taught me to understand those same organizations through the people who run them.
The realization did not arrive in a single class. It came gradually, paper by paper, case by case, until I noticed a shift. I was not just learning new concepts. I was developing a completely different understanding of leadership and organizations.
JRQ Consultants, the practice I am building today, lives at the intersection of those two worlds: the financial services and transformation expertise I have spent a career developing and the industrial-organizational psychology I unexpectedly fell in love with during this master’s program.
How did you fit your education into your life?
Balancing a career, two young daughters, and graduate school at Harvard was never really about mastering time management. It was about learning what mattered most and accepting that some days one part of my life would need more of me than the others. Every week asked for something different: leadership at work, presence as a father, discipline as a student — rarely in equal measure.
The flexible format made it possible to balance work, life, and school, but the real rhythm of the experience was built into the quiet spaces of everyday life. Early mornings before the house woke up. Late nights at the kitchen table, my 13-year-old daughter doing homework beside me while I worked through mine. Moments that felt ordinary at the time, but sacred in hindsight. And through all of it, my wife held the steady center of our family.
The most unforgettable moment of the program did not happen in a classroom. It happened the day I brought my daughters to campus and watched their faces light up as they walked through Harvard Yard. My youngest, only 5 years old at the time, pulled me down to her level, pointed toward Widener Library, and told me she was going to study there one day, “just like Dad.” That is one of those moments I know I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
Jose visiting Harvard’s campus with his wife and their two daughters.
If you could go back in time and talk to who you were before you started at HES, what would you say?
I would tell him that everything he needed for the road ahead was already inside him. To worry less, dream big, and enjoy the journey.
I was born and raised in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, the son of two teachers from Comerío, a small town nestled in the mountains, who dedicated their lives to shaping young minds. My parents taught me that education was more than a path to opportunity. It was dignity, freedom, and hope.
I came to the mainland with little more than a few dollars to my name and a long list of dreams, and I eventually earned my MBA at Syracuse University. I will never forget the look on my mother’s face as she watched me walk across the stage to receive my diploma. It was the kind of smile only a parent can give after seeing their child accomplish a lifelong dream. A few years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I lost her. But the image of that smile will stay with me forever.
Harvard belonged to a different kind of dream, the kind a kid like me does not allow himself to entertain for too long. The first time I walked through Harvard Yard, the experience felt surreal. I had not arrived alone. I carried my parents’ sacrifices, the lessons they instilled in me, and the family that has stood beside me every step of the way.
Today, when I look at my two daughters, I see the next chapter of a story that began in a classroom in the mountains of Puerto Rico, built by two teachers who believed education could change a life’s course. Watching my daughters beside me, I realize it was never the destination that mattered most. It was making sure the dream kept moving forward.
Describe your Extension experience in one word:
Momentum.
