The Abbeville Promise is a proposed scholarship program that, if successful, would guarantee a free two-year education at PTC to every student who receives a high school diploma while an Abbeville County resident.

As he paddled a turbulent section of the Chattooga River between South Carolina and Georgia, Orlando Carrillo couldn’t help but take an engineer’s interest in the various rock formations and the patterns of rushing water circumnavigating them.

A quiet, word-of-mouth recommendation of Piedmont Technical College’s Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CAM) in Laurens has brought 12 students who are completing their training at Azienda Bergamasca Formazione (ABF) ― a regional technical school in picturesque Bergamo, Italy ― to South Carolina for a month of instruction, training, and manufacturing plant tours.

It’s a really great time to live and work in the seven-county region served by Piedmont Technical College. Names like Teijin, Samsung, Lonza, Fujifilm, JTEKT and Colgate Palmolive are making their presence known by creating hundreds of well-paying jobs in our part of the state. But how did they get here?

College recruiters look for qualities like talent, agility and the ability to effectively carry the ball. Nineteen Greenwood County high school students who have the right stuff recently made it to signing day. Their playing field? It’s populated not by turf and football sleds but by CAD tools, safety goggles and robots.

Access to a quality education far transcends geographical proximity or financial status. On top of these circumstances, many students have additional unique conditions to overcome that could be physical or neurological in origin. Often their challenges are not immediately visible.

The options available to health science and nursing students at PTC are vast. While that’s a good thing, many students enroll with only a generalized notion of what they want to pursue, which may be something health-related, but they aren’t sure exactly where along the spectrum to focus. That’s why customized advising on health science and nursing careers is so critical to properly grounding the initial steps in their journey.