It was only the first day of class, but already Erin Kelly knew.
Kelly, then a freshman at the University of Vermont, walked out of her anthropology class in Williams Hall and onto the green, warmed by the sun of a blue sky New England fall day. She found a place to lie down in the grass and called her mother.
“I’m in the exact right place right now,” Kelly recalled saying.
That was in 2016. Kelly graduated last spring with a degree in anthropology, but like young people everywhere, she was thrust into a job market devastated by the coronavirus. The unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds reached 25.6% last April, and even the 9.7% rate reported in January is way above normal Vermont levels.
Kelly worries she might have to leave the place she loves.
“While still trying to hold my passion for Vermont, and hold my passion for wanting to stay, I know that I can’t stay unless something changes,” Kelly said.
Burlington wasn’t always the obvious choice for Kelly. As a high school student in New Haven, Connecticut, she had been looking only at large, big-city universities before a fateful trip to the UVM campus. She admits having only a vague idea about anthropology.
But a year later, she was meeting with a professor to declare a major in anthropology. Like so much of Kelly’s story at UVM, she said, “it was meant to be.”
“I sound very ‘woo-woo’ when I say this, but I had a dream when I was a junior in college about plants,” Kelly said.
Burlington, a city with an urban vibe near mountains and Lake Champlain, was a major draw. Along with anthropology, Kelly began pursuing a passion for herbalism, the study of plants and other natural resources for medicinal use.
In 2019, Kelly applied to be the marketing intern for Katherine Elmer, who teaches herbal medicine at UVM — and, in yet another coincidence, shared a dance class with Kelly at the time. After a summer working in the business side of the field, Kelly spent the fall as a teaching assistant for Elmer’s class while pursuing an independent research study under Luis Vivanco, professor of environmental anthropology at UVM and co-director of the Humanities Center.
Kelly wound up well-positioned for a good job after graduation — but then the pandemic pancaked her job market.
“The pandemic lockdown hit while we were on spring break,” Kelly said, “and I definitely got rejected from jobs that had [previously] accepted me.”
Kelly has been trying to stay in Burlington — a mission complicated by high rent and a tough job search. Elsewhere, analysis by Pew Research Center found 52% of 18- to 29-year-olds were living with their parents by July 2020, the first time that number had exceeded 50% since the Great Depression. About one in five U.S. adults either changed residence, or knew someone who had, as a result of pandemic-related challenges.
Kelly scraped by through the summer with a series of odd jobs on nearby farms and some child care work. The family she worked for had a raised garden bed where she could practice growing her own food, and she connected with the small but close knit herbalism community around Burlington. Kelly was struck by the parallel to the actual plant world — the network of roots and fungi that trees use to communicate with each other or redirect nutrients to trees in need.
Finding work in Burlington continues to be a struggle. She recently launched her own herbal makeup line, and the night before speaking to VTDigger, she applied to be a Ph.D. candidate in natural resources at UVM.
“I feel like the winter is always a time of reflection,” Kelly said. “And there are some herbs that are really good for the spring, [they] bring up the toxicity, and you start again anew in the spring. So hopefully, life becomes more abundant.”
