When Andrew Verma earned his high school diploma in 2007 in Columbia he already had a full-time job at the Wells Fargo customer call center in town. It was a good place to be for a newly minted high school graduate, but without a college degree, Verma knew he could eventually end up with a dead-end career.
“I was trying to figure out how to further my education without going into significant debt, which wasn’t very appealing to me,” Verma says. “Part of the problem was that my varying work schedule at the bank wasn’t the best for attending class in a traditional setting.”
Verma enrolled at Midlands Technical College and, squeezing in a class here and there, was able to earn an associate degree by 2013. That same year, the University of South Carolina launched Palmetto College as a portal for students who wanted to earn bachelor’s degrees but were constrained by time or place requirements. When Verma learned about Palmetto College’s online degree offerings, he knew this was the solution he’d been looking for.
“Prior to finding out about Palmetto College, I had a lot of uncertainty about completing a four-year degree because my work schedule would sometimes change, and that made it difficult to commit to more in-person classes,” Verma says. “And I wanted the prestige of a well-known university like USC on my resume, not some giant online institution from a state far away from home.”
Things got off to a good start with the Palmetto College admissions counselor who put him in touch with the coordinator of the business administration program at USC Aiken.
“What I loved the most was that they had a plan for me, and they gave me a good timeline for graduation. I could go full-time because they offered a faster pace — two online courses that lasted two months so you could complete four or five classes every semester,” he says. “I really liked the momentum from that, and all of the professors were really organized and available to answer my questions.
“You’ve got to be disciplined because you're getting off of work and sometimes the last thing you want to do is to open up your school laptop and see what more work you have to do.”
The flexibility of Palmetto College’s online courses was a godsend when Verma was temporarily dispatched to Idaho to train a class of new Wells Fargo hires.
“If I had been a traditional college student and not in the Palmetto College program, I would have had to drop or withdraw from the courses,” he says. “One of the other reasons I was able to make Palmetto College work is because my employer, Wells Fargo, has a tuition reimbursement program so that was a nice benefit.”
Since graduating with his business administration degree in 2015, Verma returned to USC to earn an online MBA from USC Aiken. He’s now a senior assistant vice president at Wells Fargo’s customer contact center in Charlotte, one of the bank’s biggest operation centers on the East Coast. And with more work responsibility and higher earnings, he’s been able to satisfy his penchant for travel, visiting Europe and several countries in the Caribbean and Central and South America in the past few years.
“I love anything with nature, anything with water,” he says. “You might find me on a catamaran somewhere — that’s the best place to be.”
