Thursday, February 28, 2008
My mom put me in my first dance class when I was 3 years old. One of my earliest memories is dancing to Janet Jackson songs in my bedroom and deciding right then that I wanted to dance forever.
For the next 15 years, rarely a day passed that I didn’t dance. I traveled around the country to take classes and compete. I loved rehearsing for hours, steam building at the edge of the mirrors in the studio. I turned and leaped until it felt like the skin on my toes had worn away, and even then I never wanted to stop.
To this day, I’ve never felt a rush quite like being on stage dancing. Yet when the time came to go to college and choose a career, dancing never crossed my mind. Deep down, I knew I wasn’t cut out for a dancer’s life—a life of endless auditions and sore feet.
Read Jessie’s story about students who did decide to pursue their passions for dance and other fine arts in college, and how they plan to parlay their creative tendencies into their future jobs.
I’ll always consider myself a dancer, and often, when my roommate is gone, I slip on my flat ballet shoes and dance, taking special care not to crash into any furniture.
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