COLUMBIA — In the tampon aisle of a CVS in rural Clarendon County, a sign read “This item is in high demand” and limited purchases to two boxes per customer.

It was this encounter with “period poverty,” defined as a lack of access to menstrual products and education, that led four University of South Carolina students to turn their ideas from a student contest into reality.

Four students pursuing medical and science degrees — Aastha Arora, Jiya Desai, Anusha Ghosh, and Thrisha Mote — were winners of the 2023 sponsored by South Carolina’s electric cooperatives, which asks teams of college students to come up with solutions to issues plaguing rural communities in the state.

“All of us have kind of grown up with this stigma around menstruation,” said Mote, a rising senior from Chattanooga, Tennessee, studying psychology, recently told the SC Daily Gazette. “But we also wanted to explore how that stigma can disproportionately affect rural residents.”

In the U.S., two of every five women struggle to purchase menstrual supplies due to lack of income. In the Palmetto State, one in five females ages 12 to 44 fall beneath the poverty line, according to South Carolina’s . And federal grocery benefits, what used to be known as food stamps, can’t be used to purchase pads and tampons.

Also, until Monday, South Carolina was one of 21 states taxing period products. The average box of 32 tampons in South Carolina sells for $10.99. Add the state’s 6% sales tax and up to 3% in local sales taxes, and the price goes up by nearly $1.

In rural areas, such as Clarendon County, residents often must travel longer distances to the nearest store to buy what they need.

The four Honors College students, who met in the medical-related fraternity Phi Delta Epsilon, are also members of USC’s Rural Interest Group, consisting of students interested in working in rural communities. Their research found the issue particularly impacted school-age girls.

Speaking to other female students about their experiences, they heard from one woman about how students would ask the school nurse for toilet paper to use while on their period because they didn’t have access to pads.

“This kind of opened our eyes to kind of the cycle of poverty that happens in areas like these where they learn these from their parents,” said Desai, of Fort Mill, who starts medical school in the fall.

Their research into the issue and a proposal to form a non-profit to donate menstrual products to school districts in the state earned each of the women a $5,000 cash prize last year from the electric cooperatives.

It could have ended there, but the group decided to push their idea further.

“We kind of felt unfulfilled to just stop there,” said Arora, a rising junior from Charlotte studying biology. “We put in so much work and we felt like it wasn’t something that was unattainable.”

They formed a student group at USC called No Period Left Behind. About 175 students signed up to participate.

“We didn’t just want to research this issue. We wanted to actively try to combat it,” added Ghosh of Greenville, who also starts medical school in the fall.

The four women took part of their prize money from the contest and started buying pads and tampons. A bake sale on USC’s campus earned them an additional $400. And a pair of charitable sororities donated $150 and 3,000 pads.

The group then hosted events to pack the supplies given out at women’s shelters and middle and high schools, as well as a food pantry for USC students and in women’s restrooms in the library, student center and other high-traffic buildings on the college campus.

At Saluda Middle School, they held a seminar to teach the girls about periods.

No Period Left Behind joins the ranks of several such organizations around the state seeking to combat period poverty: Revolution Red in Columbia, Period Pixies in the Lowcountry and The Period Project headquartered in Greenville.

Making connections with these groups also led No Period Left Behind to join legislative efforts on the issue.

Legislators, mostly female, have tried for five years to paid on menstrual products. These items generate an estimate $7 million in state and local sales taxes annually, according to state fiscal experts.

The got unanimous approval in the House last year. But it wasn’t until two weeks ago that senators gave final approval, also unanimously, to eliminate the so-called tampon tax. It took a from Sen. Margie Bright Matthews, D-Walterboro, who held up tax breaks on golf club memberships, to get that vote on the Senate floor.

Gov. Henry McMaster signed the legislation into law Monday. While the law’s supposed to take effect with his signature, it remained unclear Tuesday when stores will actually stop taxing menstrual products bought in South Carolina.

A spokesperson for the state Department of Revenue said the agency is working on a plan and will notify retailers of the necessary adjustments “as soon as possible.”

No Period Left Behind was among several groups that wrote letters and spoke at legislative hearings in favor of the proposal. Next year, they hope to push lawmakers to put funding in the budget for schools to purchase menstrual products and have them available free to students.

“We can continue to donate to different schools and women’s shelters,” Desai said. “We’re trying to do just the best with what we can, but that would really be hitting like the root issue.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .

COLUMBIA — University of South Carolina seniors studying finance and computer science were the first participants in a taxpayer-funded initiative to train Palmetto State students on a quantum supercomputer for future high-tech, high-paying jobs.

Jordan Fowler, of Charleston; Carter Burns, of Raleigh, North Carolina; and Jack Oberman, of Irmo, were part of a $20,000 research project funded by the newly formed South Carolina Quantum Association. The trio used quantum computing to improve retirement investment strategies used by a Columbia-area bank they declined to identify.

Now the Quantum Association is looking for five to seven with mountains of data to sift through that may benefit from quantum computing access. The association will then pair those companies with university students and researchers to come up with industry solutions while turning students into specialists of this next-era technology through hands-on training.

The association, funded through a $15 million earmark in the state budget, is using a portion of that money to rent time on a quantum computer that’s housed at the University of Maryland but accessed through a web portal in the nonprofit’s office in Columbia’s Five Points.

The quantum computer can solve in minutes complex calculations involving vast numbers of data points that would take years using a standard computer.

In the case of the USC students, they ran simulations to determine what the best investments would be for a person seeking to retire by a certain age. Those simulations account for everything from weather patterns to war and the impacts those things have on publicly traded companies, according to the association’s organizer, Joe Queenan.

In working on the project, the students used rented time on the out-of-state computer while being coached by the association’s experts. In the end, the bank will benefit from a new, complex investment model not currently available to most banks in the region.

With their new-found data analytics and computing skills, the USC students took part in The Massachusetts Institute of Technology iQuHack Hackathon competition last month, facing off against 300 other students and earning a third-place finish.

Their next goal is to apply what they have learned to a small hedge fund that two of the students in the group founded, called Shaw Circle. They want to grow their business and carve out careers for themselves in the financial sector.

“We’ve got students from the Darla Moore School of Business who went to MIT and competed against several national teams on a level that we’re just not used to around here,” said Sen. Dick Harpootlian, who sponsored the $15 million earmark approved in the state budget last year.

The Columbia Democrat championed the effort as an economic development investment in the state’s “intellectual capital.”

“These are the best and the brightest,” Harpootlian said of the USC students. “They demonstrated that given access to a quantum computer and given access to this technology, students in this state can excel.”

It’s Harpootlian’s hope that, when these students graduate in the spring, they will stay in Columbia as they seek to grow their hedge fund business.

According to the students, quantum computing could allow them to simultaneously analyze trillions of investment combinations to find the most profitable.

“We now have access to a larger amount of data, and we’re able to crunch that to make better informed decisions for ourselves and our investors,” Burns said.

Rather than taking hours on a standard computer, they’re receiving training on how to use a quantum computer to get their calculation time down to minutes, Fowler added.

The students have largely invested on behalf of friends and family willing to contribute to their fund, Burns said.

“Now it’s time to get some real capital into it, hire some bright minds and grow it,” Burns said. “We want to bring opportunities to people in the South.”

They hope to bring in investors from around the Southeast and increase their fund’s size to between $25 million and $50 million. Having the added benefit of quantum computing skills could make their small team more successful when it comes to picking the best deals for their clients, allowing them to compete even when up against larger investment firms, they said.

Supporting student groups like this one is just one portion of what the quantum association hopes to accomplish.

Later phases of the state-funded initiative involve designing a quantum computing specialty degree program that colleges across the state could replicate.

At least one of those will be offered at a historically Black college in South Carolina. Organizers also want to launch an online training academy for workers looking to transfer into a high-tech career.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .

COLUMBIA – A state-funded initiative to train South Carolina college students on a quantum supercomputer for future high-tech, high-paying jobs kicks into gear in January.

The newly formed South Carolina Quantum Association will start pairing students and professors with companies seeking industry advancements that only a quantum computer can provide, according to the group’s organizer, Joe Queenan.

The nonprofit is funded through a $15 million . The initial millions spent will pay for quantum consultants to coach students each semester through spring 2025, starting at the University of South Carolina before expanding to other colleges. It will also pay to rent time on a quantum computer housed at the University of Maryland but accessed through a web portal in the nonprofit’s office in Columbia’s Five Points.

Because the technology is new, there are few experts in the field.

The association’s goal is to make South Carolina students specialists of this next-era technology through hands-on training before they graduate.

The hope is that a concentration of such experts in the Palmetto State could, in turn, lure more companies here to take advantage of the trained workforce stepping out of the state’s public and private universities.

“If we can train a generation on the skills needed, they’re going to be sought after by every entity in the world at a great salary,” state Sen. Dick Harpootlian told the SC Daily Gazette.

That’s why the Columbia Democrat lobbied for the state dollars. He wants to make the technology, with its complex computing capabilities, widely available through college and workforce training programs.

While classic computers operate under a binary system of 1s and 0s, quantum computing is multidimensional. These computers solve in minutes complex calculations involving vast numbers of data points that would take years using a standard computer.

Some promising uses for the technology include the development of new pharmaceuticals and batteries. Banks are using it to prevent cyber-theft, reduce risky lending, and meet new regulations put in place in the wake of the Great Recession, according to IBM, which has more than 20 quantum computer systems around the world.

For example, to develop a new drug, scientists typically work by trial and error. It’s a long process. Researchers run thousands of tests in hopes that a molecule will be found that can combat a disease. But a quantum computer could run even the most complex simulations to determine how subatomic particles that make up a molecule interact. The same is true for scientists searching for new materials for batteries that would make them charge faster and hold more power.

In Silicon Valley, Mercedes-Benz is partnering with IBM to test how sulphur molecules behave in different environments, with the goal of replacing lithium-ion batteries. And Boeing recently gave $3.5 million to a Chicago-based quantum group to study quantum-enabled sensors.

Congress has funneled at least $3.7 billion to quantum research hubs across the country since 2019.

The same entrepreneurial leaders behind Columbia’s GrowCo organization, a conglomeration of technology startups that want to increase the number of high-tech companies in the Capital City, are leading the SC Quantum Association.

‘An open race’

The non-profit wants to get South Carolina in the game, alongside early adopters in more established quantum clusters such as Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and Boulder, Colorado. Its leaders also want to leverage the state money to win more federal dollars.

“We can be world-renowned for what we do here,” Harpootlian said. “The question is, are we going to be last in the country or are we going to be the first.”

Webbed partnerships already have sprung up around studying the technology, signing on Ivy League giants such as Harvard and Yale, renowned technology schools such as MIT and Virginia Tech, as well as a handful of state schools.

While those places may be ahead in terms of research dollars, Queenan said, the technology is still new and broad enough for South Carolina to distinguish itself by starting now.

“It’s still an open race but it’s going to take highly skilled workers,” he said.

The fast pace of the technology’s development means demand for experts in the field is outpacing the availability of talent. The quantum association wants South Carolinians to fill that niche.

Harpootlian, whose district includes USC and Five Points, wants to reverse what he calls the “exodus of our best and brightest” and make South Carolina a technological center.

“What we see is, the kids who want to develop skills in technology, they leave,” he said.

This wasn’t his first attempt to land a quantum computer initiative in Five Points, though he did recraft his request to win more support.

Last year, Harpootlian got a $25 million earmark in the budget to buy a quantum computer. But , and legislators in with that line-item veto.

McMaster did not veto the cheaper option of renting the time.

Later phases of the state-funded initiative involve designing a quantum computing specialty degree program that colleges across the state could replicate. At least one of those will be offered at a historically Black college in South Carolina. Organizers also want to launch an online training academy for workers looking to transfer into a high-tech career.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .