Mary Anna Ball

I still incorporate dance in my life every day (and still perform!)—going into academia or another field beyond strictly ballet does not necessarily mean you have to give it all up if you don't want to. I have found my background in ballet and dance is one of my greatest assets, and it has constantly made me stand out. When I started my undergraduate career, I came into Classics by accident: I was scheduled into Calculus by my advisor because of my ACT score, but I didn't want to take math five days a week at 8:00am, so I took the only open language class, Latin. I fell in love with how structured it was like ballet and how the field of Classics opened up the history and structure of narratives. After I graduated, I had no plans of continuing school because I did not think I could afford a graduate education with what I was making from ballet, making a film, and having just graduated (even without any debt). Thankfully, my Honors College Dean did not accept that and encouraged me to talk to the university's international scholarship office, and it was through there I found and applied for a Fulbright. During that application process the documentary I was working on won an Emmy, and about six months and a couple interviews later I was awarded a Fulbright to study dance in London. After graduating, I used my dance research knowledge to work in the archives of my ballet company and  started applying to more graduate programs. My thought was that a graduate program in something like Classics, English, or Comparative Literature would give me a better understanding still of narrative; my goal is to ultimately become a scholar-in-residence for a ballet company or something involving the interdisciplinary threads between the Humanities and dance. The transition can be as gradual or as sharp as you want: for me, I am still on a gradual slope, but the physical part of dance informs the intellectual and vice-versa.