ALUMNI
“I LOVED TONY YOUNG’S HISTORY CLASS. I REMEMBER THE COURT CASE WHERE I COULDN’T WAIT TO DO THE RESEARCH.”
ELLIE KLEMSZ “The experience was the scariest thing I have ever done but also the most rewarding. In the end, I think it taught me to take risks. I learned to believe in myself.” -- ELLIE KLEMSZ, ON TRAVELING TO BOLIVIA TO VOLUNTEER WITH CHILDREN
“It was my first time traveling out of the country on my own, living in a new city where I hardly knew anyone,” Ellie Klemsz (’10) says of her Bolivian experience, volunteering after graduating from Indiana University in 2018. At Indiana University, she was a member of the IU women’s rowing team, a cyclist in Little 500, and a double major in Sports Media and Spanish. She now works for the Indiana Pacers, and was recently promoted to the position of Corporate Ticket Sales Manager. She made the decision to defer getting a “big kid job” for a year by moving to Cochabamba, Bolivia in January 2019, to volunteer. The seed of that decision sprouted in the summer of 2015, when family friends invited the Ellie and her family to go to Bolivia with them to volunteer. They spent a week in Cochabamba with the local children. “It was one of the best experiences of my life,” Klemsz says. “When I was graduating from IU and deciding what I wanted to do, I got back in touch with the Niños con Valor (a volunteer organization for children) leaders to see if a volunteer experience would be possible.” She ended up living there for four months. “I was using my Spanish, and I was hanging out with kids who I absolutely loved and I was experiencing a new country. I’ve always loved traveling and then the more I thought about it, I was like ‘I don’t want to go to another country to teach English. I want to go to another country to live and to experience it and do something that I will love.’” ________________________ Klemsz latched onto Spanish as an avenue of study at Sycamore and into high school. She attended University High School, where she excelled as a three-sport athlete and developed her passion for the language. She found that the Spanish classes at Sycamore had given her the ability to move ahead quickly, and to immerse herself in the language.
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