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Most students come to WorldQuant University in their 20s or 30s. Steve Archuleta graduated in summer 2026 at age 58 after pursuing other ventures in the United States and Portugal.

“Middle age, rather than being a hindrance or disadvantage, has enriched my lifelong learning,” Steve says.

This irregular journey into tech started in Sacramento, California, where Steve was born and raised as the oldest of six children. He graduated from Saint Mary's College of California with a liberal arts degree in 1991 and moved to Maryland, where he owned a garden gift shop called The Good Life Market that twice won Best of Baltimore for small-town retail boutiques.

Along with his partner of 27 years, Randall Neely, Steve spent the next two years in Portugal, where his mother was born and where Steve now holds dual citizenship. The couple made their home on Madeira Island, an archipelago known as the “Pearl of the Atlantic.”

Steve began coding in 2019 at age 52, completing a six-month MERN full-stack bootcamp at University of California, Davis. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Steve was one of 20 Sacramento residents awarded an Advanced Data Analytics fellowship through the Sacramento Economic Council and the Greater Sacramento Urban League.

This is when he shifted from web development to data analytics, which propelled him to a yearlong postgraduate certification at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. From there, Steve completed certifications in SQL Architecture and Modeling, Generative AI for Natural Language Processing, and the Microsoft Azure Professional certification, all through Great Learning.

One of his mentors told him about the Master of Science in Financial Engineering program at WorldQuant University, so Steve studied and earned admission. He finished the 10-course curriculum with a 91% average. About halfway through this two-year graduate coursework, Steve found time to complete The RAG Pack’s certification in Reinforcement Learning for LLMs, focusing on the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm.

Even during this deep dive into tech, Steve stayed grounded as a gardener. He also worked an hourly cashier job at a family-owned botanical nursery, ringing up plants and potting soil while studying financial engineering and building a causal-aware, machine-learning risk-forecasting pipeline.

“I am a devoted gardener and poet by nature, always germinating seeds, propagating and watering flowers, mowing my lawn, and harvesting vegetables. Gardening is my well-deserved respite from hours, days, weeks, months, and years of studying,” Steve says.

Steve says his effort at WorldQuant University has opened his mind to new possibilities.

“The program didn’t just teach me financial engineering,” he says. “It gave me a genuine second act. I started coding at 52 and finished the degree at 58. I am now in the thick of the search for my first career role in the tech field.”

To showcase his coding and engineering skills, Steve built a website at https://stevearchuleta.com.