Ex-Ram track star cycles through Stanford on his way from Port Chester to a lucrative financial job in Miami
July 17, 2024 at 11:11 p.m.
As one of Port Chester's best distance runners of all time, ex-Ram scholar-athlete Joseph Tapia has always gone the extra mile.
But once his self-described "Hail Maryest of Hail Mary college application reaches" landed him a full scholarship to elite Stanford University in California's Silicon Valley area of Palo Alto, a world away from where he grew up in Port Chester, Tapia's wheeling, dealing and culture shock added lots of extra mileage to that journey. And his life cycle changed with that passage.
Because Stanford didn't quite know what to do with someone like Tapia and vice versa. "I'm not saying Stanford was unwelcoming at first, it was more like they didn't quite know what to do with someone like me coming from a background like mine," he recalled.
Joseph Tapia rode his motorcycle from Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., back to Port Chester.Courtesy of Joseph Tapia
So college became a real learning experience in more ways than one. "I switched majors from computer science to economics because I couldn't see spending my life around computers," he said. "And I always worked hard. But as soon as I realized life is all about choices, making the right ones and understanding that what happens is all about the choices you make, I began to fit in and Stanford began to feel like a second home to me."
Internships, bikes, economics
His choices stemming from that change in his career path led to various collegiate internships overseas. And his best way to get around on the cheap was motor biking. He motorbiked his way around Italy and Vietnam during his downtime as an intern in search of his place in the world.
And when he got back home, that experience led to his getting a motorcycle of his own for roundtrip commutes from Port Chester to Stanford at the start and end of each school year and the vacations in between.
But he wasn't any kind of Marlon Brando-style biker from "The Wild One" or a Jack Nicholson-style "Easy Rider."
For Tapia, his motorcycle became an extension of his classrooms.
A different reality
That, in turn, led him to cycle away to and from a sheltered academics-focused campus life to a different kind of reality than anything he had experienced growing up in Port Chester.
So it followed that his first post-graduate experience after Stanford resulted from his decision to celebrate his June 16 college graduation with a cross-country ride in search of himself and America on his way back home. It was a ride made easier because he had a job offer for what he calls "an incredible amount of money, especially for someone my age.”
Joseph Tapia competes as a track star during his Port Chester High School career.By File Photo
"I made it out of Port Chester, and a lot of kids smarter than me didn't, but I made it out because I had a dream about what I wanted to accomplish and that's what I set out to do," Tapia said shortly after arriving back home. "And I made it out of Port Chester because I made the hard choices and did the hard work to make that dream happen."
Those choices and all that hard work won him a lucrative job with a major financial consulting firm. He also has a deferred $40,000 graduate school scholarship to study business at the University of Virginia, another prestige university, with that grant giving him up to five years before he has to enroll.
Envisions better days for family
That interval will give him time to earn enough money so he can give his hard-working immigrant parents a chance to retire to their native Mexico. It will also help him give his two nieces an opportunity to lead a better life with a lot less hardship than he had in the days when he was growing up near the projects worrying about how his family would make ends meet living from paycheck to paycheck in ways that never seemed to stretch far enough.
"At the end of the next five years, I hope to be able to start a non-profit foundation so nobody in need will ever have to go through what I went through growing up in Port Chester," he said. "Because nobody should ever have to go through what I went through. And now all those all-nighters spent studying and all the hard choices I made paid off. I made it out. And a lot of kids smarter than me didn't."
As he talks, Tapia exudes a hard-earned confidence that has resulted in his landing a high-paying job with "BCG," the Boston Consulting Group, his new position taking him to one of the high-powered firm's offices in Miami. That means another long motorcycle ride from Port Chester to Florida.
But that distance is nothing compared to how far Tapia has already come.
He was a desperate kid from Mexico who grew up in Port Chester crying without tears late at night in the foldout single bed in the same bedroom where his parents slept. He worried about the splinters and bruises his father brought home with him after hammering and sawing the day away as an underpaid carpenter. But he knew it would take more than his worrying to help bring about his family's upward mobility. He knew early on that his academic success would be the key to his and their way out. So he worked hard in and out of the classroom from an early age.
Running to escape reality
"I've adapted to the conditions stacked against me," he said. "I am willing to work hard to fight for my dream, and I know I still have room to grow."
At first he thought athletics would be his ticket to a college scholarship. So he ran track. And ran. And ran. Running as an escape from his reality. And he became a potential college track scholarship athlete who won the Bobcat Invitational Cross Country Championships at Byram Hills against all comers as a freshman and kept on getting better. He recorded some of the best times in Port Chester High School history in the 1600 meters (4:32 for the metric equivalent of the mile), 2:02 for the 800 meters and sub 55 seconds for the 400.
As he wrote in his college recruiting letters at that time:
"I am an athlete who has put countless hours into the sport, I not only train in practice, but I work out on my own after school, on weekends, on school breaks, on Christmas, on New Years, every day. I put great emphasis into my future. On top of that I take the challenge to do my best in school with the rigorous AP (Advanced Placement) and IB (International Baccalaureate) courses Port Chester High School offers, and work part time on weekends when I'm not competing. I've trained in freezing cold and extremely high temperatures, I've adapted to the conditions put against me, willing to work hard and fight for my dream. I have room to grow, and hopefully can impress college coaches. I don’t come from a family of wealthy background, so having sports in my life has opened doors for me to be able to consider competing for college, but also getting a degree that’ll help me advance in the social stratification."
He captained the Rams track team, made the All-League and All-Conference Team and earned All-Section Honorable Mention while also receiving Port Chester's end-of-the-year outstanding scholar-athlete award. But a not-so-funny thing happened to him on the way from there to his senior year. COVID came along and the pandemic gave him plenty of time to think that there was a lot more to life than running.
Loved running, not competing
"I realize that while I loved running, I didn't like competing," he said. "I realized running was an escape. It took me outside of myself and the life I had. I thought a track scholarship was my only way out. But then I realized I liked the friends I made on the track, I loved the runner's high, but I just didn't like competing against them."
An elated Joseph Tapia on his June 16 graduation day from Stanford University.Courtesy of Joseph Tapia
His performance in the classroom was as impressive as it was on the track. And academics gave him his classroom version of winning the Bobcat Relays from the get-go. In 8th grade he took Algebra 1 Honors, then Living Environment Honors as a freshman along with Geometry, Global History and Physics. Sophomore year he moved up in class and in the alphabet of AP and IB and scored high in AP Physics and World History. As a junior, he came across as a brainiac in AP courses like Computer Science Principles, AP and IB Calculus, AP English and Spanish Language and U.S. History and IB Chemistry. And as a senior he was among the top students in Environmental Science, English Lit and Calculus.
He was also in the Spanish, Math and English Honor Societies, the National Honor Society, consistently made the High Honor Roll, was president of the Table Tennis Club, held down a part-time job weekends to help support his family and was a four-year member of STEER for Student Athletes.
Reached for the stars
All of his hard work made him think he was headed for Westchester Community College or, if he got lucky, maybe one of the SUNY colleges because his family simply didn't have the money to send him to an elite college. But one of his student advisors told him his GPA ranked him right up there with the school's best scholars, so why not try for "reach colleges" he couldn't afford without substantial financial aid. So he did and came away with scholarships to such upper tier schools as Brown, Georgetown and Stanford.
He opted for Stanford. And survived the initial culture shock as he and the college got used to his being the poor kid from Port Chester striving to prove he belonged on the upscale 8,180-acre campus located 35 miles south of San Francisco and 20 miles north of San Jose in the heart of Northern California's Silicon Valley, home to Google, Yahoo!, Hewlett-Packard, and many other cutting edge companies that were started by and continue to be led by Stanford alumni and faculty. It was a far cry from home. And Tapia began to wonder whether he would ever feel at home there. Especially after he switched his major from computer science to economics, a subject that made more sense to him. That's when his wheels started spinning, literally and figuratively.
His economics major led to far-flung internships in places ranging from Italy to Vietnam. But those internships also led to his learning out of the classroom as well because he also had to learn how to get around inexpensively. And that involved relying on motor bikes. And those motor bikes led to his getting his own motorcycle once he got back home. That motorcycle helped him do more than commute from Port Chester to Stanford and familiarize himself with the area known as The Peninsula with the Santa Cruz Mountains and Pacific Ocean to the west and San Francisco Bay to the east. That bike also taught him a lot about himself and the importance of the life choices he had to make.
Turning points along the way
An early turning point came shortly after he first got the motorcycle and was riding back to college after a winter vacation home. The bike broke down in the middle of a snowstorm in what Tapia described as Nowhere, Virginia. “I was alone in a dingy hotel room with little money trying to figure out how to get the missing parts to get the motorcycle going. And I realized I had nobody to rely on but myself to get out of that predicament and make it back to school on time. I don't know how I did it. But I did it. And then there was my ride back to Port Chester after my graduation. I found myself in a bar in the equivalent of Nowhere, Kansas, talking to a bartender and she was telling me her boyfriend was moving to Boulder, Colorado, and she had to decide whether she was going to move there with him. So everybody has to make choices. And those choices decide not just where you will go but what you will become."
His turned out right. And now he is home again for a last local go around with two of his best buddies, Robbie and Thomas Perrone (who teamed up with him as the best Ram one-two running punch of their era). They vacationed together in Puerto Rico during the last spring break. Only now he and his motorcycle will soon graduate into a new life in Miami as a financial consultant. After that comes deferred graduate school in Virginia on another free ride. And after that, who knows what except Tapia thinks that it will include another job with a lot more money that will help him help Port Chester kids not have to go through what he went through growing up in poverty. And that will make all those all-nighters studying worthwhile as he goes vroom vrooming into the future.
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