By JACLYN BURKE
Student Writer
Courtney Gentry should be dancing every day, but she looks at cells through a microscope in zoology lab instead because life threw her a curveball.
It all started with a free dance class when she was 7 years old. She was hooked and started taking dance classes three nights a week.
By the time she was 13, she had competed in classical ballet, tap, jazz, hip hop, lyrical and point competitions. She won numerous medals, and even won a regional dance competition during her years in grade school.
She earned a full scholarship to dance in college in Arizona. During her first year of college, she took care of her grandmother who had been diagnosed with cancer, while her parents slowly made the move to Oklahoma to run a family farm.
She always dreamed of dancing her way through life by having a dance-related career, but her life ended up taking a different path. Over the many years of dancing, a hip injury built up, so she had surgery to fix it. However, the surgery went all wrong, leaving her with nothing but a pile of crushed dreams, and a dying grandmother.
She was left unable to dance, so her scholarship was taken away. In order to get college tuition paid for, she had only one choice. She had to move to the farm in Oklahoma and live with her parents.
Courtney said since a career in dance is out of the question now, she wants to research cancer in honor of her three grandparents who died from the disease.
So Courtney Gentry looks through a microscope in zoology lab instead of dancing her way through life.