Do you remember when you were at that just-become-a-teenager stage, when music suddenly became the most important definer of your individuality? When listening to that music had to be a sacred activity, untainted by anything that might distract you from the sounds? When seeing that music performed live made you cry, and drift through the next week in a haze of wonder?

Ok, I just re-read that. Maybe I was always unusually obsessive. Regardless, I grew out of that. Or out of it in relation to music, anyway. Sometimes I almost miss it, feeling an odd poignancy for that reaction, knowing that, however much I enjoy a gig now, it will never again affect me in the way it did at that age. And then I remember that I still do feel that way, just about something else: ballet.

“You’ll never get an interview at Cambridge,” my teacher, who shall remain nameless, told me back in those hellish days of personal statements, when my less than brilliant AS results arrived. “Don’t even bother. Try Oxford instead” (happily, this enables me to put a little of the beloved Oxford-bashing into my article, though of course that isn’t what he meant at all). “I can’t go to Oxford,” I responded, upon my return from visiting the City of Dreaming Spires, “I need the Cambridge Ballet Club.”

I’d like to restore ballet and opera to their rightful place amongst the various theatre arts, rather than confining them to their current position as the archaic pursuits of the rich and elderly. Not only is this false – the Royal Opera House has student tickets from only £1 this season – but it seems to me a sad mistake to dismiss an entire art form. It is highly unusual to hear anyone say they don’t like music, or that they can’t go and see a film because they know nothing about how to make films. In fact, if a film was only meaningful to filmmakers, we would probably consider it, at least in some ways, a failure as a piece of art. Like music, art, film and theatre, ballet and opera set out to move, to entertain, and to tell a story. Just as with all art and entertainment, there will be good pieces and bad pieces, and pieces which cause endless debate. The variety is so great, there will always be something that will intrigue and excite. This approach worked on me (I used to think I didn’t like opera) when someone finally pointed out that I might just not like the composers to whom I had been exposed. A hearty dose of Bizet’s Carmen soon put me right.

My dear baby sister, growing up a self-identifying tomboy, told me that ballet was for girls and thus utterly boring. My response was to show her Le Corsaire, a ballet about pirates based on a poem by Byron. It worked. As with so much art, one only needs a way in, a gateway, to open the door to everything else it can offer. My sister has no interest in the technique of ballet, and never wanted to try it herself. Despite all my best efforts, she cares not at all for a particularly beautiful pirouette, or an especially well-performed jeté, but she loves a good story, and she loves going to the theatre. As an artist, she brings along my little pair of opera glasses and spends the evening marvelling at the intricacy and imagination of the sets and costumes. My father, equally unimpressed by technique, likes going to see performances of scores he played in his orchestra days. My brother, an athlete, appreciates the sheer skill of the dancers, easily equal to the strength and endurance of Olympians: one performance of The Sleeping Beauty requires a male dancer to lift more than 1.2 tonnes of ballerinas, and burns more energy than a professional footballer does in two matches.

As a student ambassador to the Royal Opera House, I now have an official name for the role I have been unofficially performing for years – acting as a sort of conversionist for the worlds of opera and ballet – and I get to spend more time at the Opera House in return, something I would never say no to. In my last year in Cambridge before I begin my full-time dance training, I will be leading trips both to the cinemas in Cambridge and to the Royal Opera House itself in London to see various operas and ballets, as well as organising film nights and socials in the colleges. The Royal Opera House Student Scheme is free to join, and enables students to book early, access the cheaper student tickets, and book for special student performances.

The ballet club in Cambridge welcomes everyone from complete beginners to advanced practitioners, and it is one of the friendliest, most inclusive and passionate groups of people I have ever met. There are opportunities for everyone to perform, or just to enjoy classes. I certainly don’t know what I would have done without the escape of dance in this intense environment, and it is the ballet club which has made it possible for me to achieve my dream of training as a dancer, when I had believed it to be too late. Who knows where I would be now, had I accepted defeat and never applied to Cambridge?

The ballet club is running a 24 Hour Dance show on 8th November. Contact mf523 for more information. Booking for the winter season at the Royal Opera House is now open – sign up at www.roh.org.uk/students, and follow Molly’s blog at www.facebook.com/HoveringLife.