ALL DRESSED UP AND Nowhere TO GO

“It’s hard not having the support system I had. It’s a scary time.”
NATASHA NIELSEN, 22 University of Michigan

THE FIRST THING YOU SHOULD know about Natasha Nielsen is that she lives in a house with 11 other 20-something women. Not a sorority house—though the 21-year-old University of Michigan senior did pledge Alpha Gamma Delta freshman year, and quickly got accustomed to having a bunch of people around when she needed help with homework (she’s a public policy major) or a cheap beer down at Good Time Charley’s ($2.50 drafts on “Mug Club Mondays”). So when the coronavirus pandemic started tearing through the U.S., her little corner of the world got pretty lonely.

U. of M.’s classes are all online now, and the Ann Arbor campus is deserted. Nielsen’s graduation ceremony has been canceled, along with the lawn parties, bonfires and barbecues where she expected she’d be celebrating her final weeks as a student. Most of her roommates have moved back home, leaving Nielsen and four other girls in an eerily quiet off-campus house that was buzzing with activity less than a month ago.

“It’s hard not having the support system I had,” she says. “It’s a scary time.”

In mid-April, without a post-college job lined up and with the prospects looking grim in the current environment, Nielsen wasn’t sure how she’d make her rent for May. “I was so stressed about money,” she says. But just in the nick of time, she landed a job starting May 1 working the phones for the state Democratic Party—remotely, for the foreseeable future—which will tide her over for now.

That’s a big relief for Nielsen, who still bears emotional scars from the Great Recession, and the blow it dealt her family. The resulting financial strain, she says, contributed to her parents’ divorce and changed the course of her own life forever. It also left her with ongoing anxiety about her finances. She says, “I’m constantly thinking, when is the other shoe going to drop?”