Kelly attended Canaan elementary school and Saxton Middle School. When asked what teachers were inspirational to her she responded, "Canaan - Mrs. Stein, because she encouraged me to write and instilled in me a love for poetry. Saxton - Mrs. Sweeney - because she pushed us very hard but still allowed us to have fun. P.M.H.S. - Mrs. Liebermann - she made learning French fun and allowed me to be a little creative during my stint as French Honor Society President; Mrs. Cabrera - she introduced me to marketing, which I loved so much that I went on to major in it in college."

Kelly fondly reminisced about her days at Patchogue-Medford, "When I was President of the French Honor Society and decided to hold a yard sale at my house to raise money to take the group out to dinner at Le Soir, I asked everyone to bring over items to sell as well as baked goods and we spent an entire Saturday in my driveway holding this event. We used the money for dinner at Le Soir. We had our own private room upstairs and had a great time - the food was wonderful. Also on my list of memories would be my three years on the Dance Team/Kickline. Dancing at the football games and basketball games was so much fun and the competitions we used to participate in at Nassau Community College were amazing. It was so exciting to perform in front of so many people."

Kelly graduated from NYU in December 2000 with a double major in International Business and Marketing and a minor in French. She went to the Stern School of Business at NYU and was a member of the Scholars Group there.

In her work for ICD Publications, her main responsibility is to write for their website - hotelbusiness.com, a news source for the hotel industry. About once a month she attends important industry conferences, trade shows, and other events across the country. She is responsible for "investigating" and "reporting" what's going on in the industry - mergers, acquisitions, new hotel openings, etc. She provides content for the website including "exclusives" that result from uncovering things that hotel companies have not yet announced.

She is also responsible for getting all the written content onto the Internet and into the world. She puts together and sends out "Daily E-mail" which contains the top news items of the day and is e-mailed out every morning to her list of subscribers. Their readers, who are busy high-level hotel industry executives, don't always have time to read everything on the site so she chooses the news items she feels they need to see.

Concurrently, she also writes for their two print publications - Hotel Business Magazine and Hotel Journal. Hotel Business is a tabloid size publication that is sent out bi-weekly to their subscribers, which, like the website, covers news, trends and analysis of happenings in the industry. Hotel Journal is a monthly tabloid size magazine that covers real estate transactions in the hotel industry.

Finally, in an effort to utilize her marketing degree, she also handles "special projects" for her company. These include developing "house ads" which advertise their website in the Hotel Business magazine, developing media kit pieces to sell advertising in print publications and other marketing pieces to facilitate ad sales for the website. She is also in charge of creating and executing "advertorials" for clients who purchase this type of advertising. An advertorial is a 4-12 page insert in their magazine that is part advertisement and part editorial.