Alyssa Klemm

Alyssa Klemm is a junior at North Central College pursuing a B.A. Accounting degree. She is currently a tax intern at Aldi Corporate USA in Batavia, Illinois. She plans to stay an extra year to pursue a Master of Financial Management. Alyssa was born with a rare liver disease called Biliary Atresia. Throughout her life, she has always been afraid to tell her story, but during her freshman year of college, she had a breakthrough. She started realizing that this liver disease is who she is, and she needed to embrace it and start sharing her story. She started sharing her story on her social media and began raising money for the America Liver Foundation. She walked for the first time in the American Liver Foundation’s Liver Walk in Chicago, Illinois and she raised over a thousand dollars. Even though she is an exception and one of the few with Biliary Atresia that has yet to receive a liver transplant, she wants to spread awareness for all of those with her disease that had a liver transplant. And who knows, a liver transplant could still be in her future. Looking back at her second surgery, she realized that she wanted to spread information about organ donation to increase awareness. She believes everyone should be registered as an organ donor. In her advanced writing class, she talked to an author named B.J Hollars. B.J. asked her, “What would you write about if you were not afraid?” Once she heard him ask that she got the chills, she knew what she wanted to write about for her last paper.