Growing up in Concord, North Carolina, just outside Charlotte, Jacob Palmer was a classic academic achiever. “I was a good student,” he said in an interview with Fortune. “In high school, I participated in all types of extracurriculars, student leadership, I did a lot of public speaking. I had all sorts of friends.” But he said something changed during the pandemic. “School looked drastically different doing online classes and Zoom calls. It felt very intangible.” He said he figured out pretty quickly that online college “didn’t work for me. I hated it.”
Palmer said that instead of sticking with college, he tried things out, including a stint at a FedEx warehouse for several months, and a change of scenery at his grandparents in rural Virginia, where he worked at a factory for a few months.
