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Pole Stephen Okuttu earned a statistics degree at a local university in Uganda and started his career in 2017. Five years later, he was working as a data associate at Yalelo Uganda, a sustainable producer of tilapia fish from the region’s Lake Victoria.

Looking for a career boost, Pole enrolled in the Applied Data Science Lab at WorldQuant University in 2023. After completing the academic offering in about 16 weeks, he received a raise and promotion. He is now a senior data and analytics associate at the company, where his duties include business intelligence, machine learning, and web scraping.

“I chose WorldQuant University because its content was very rich in relation to data,” Pole says. “It was free, and I had the resources of the internet and a laptop.”

The certificate program includes eight self-paced projects, covering real-world topics like earthquake damage in Nepal, bankruptcy prediction in Poland, and market forecasting on the Bombay Stock Exchange in India. To complete the work, Pole had to polish his Python programming skills and learn a new language, NoSQL. He also learned teamwork.

“WorldQuant University taught me how to write code, but not just code alone,” he says. “I also learned how to blend with a team and produce results.”

Photo: Pole Okuttu Stephen attends a WorldQuant University alumni mixer on Sept. 4, 2025, in Kigali, Rwanda, at the former Alpha Palace Hotel.