Pliés & Puts: A Ballet Dancer’s Unlikely Path To Indiana Kelley, Quant Finance & Machine Learning

Most business students can sketch their careers before they finish their first semester: a degree, an internship, a job offer, a promotion or two. Miguel Calero’s sketch looks more like a scatter plot.

In roughly a decade, Calero has gone from middle linebacker to professional ballet dancer. Along the way, he picked up a triple major at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, a fascination with options trading and a growing interest in quantitative finance and machine learning. Today he’s in New York, studying through Columbia University’s Data Science Institute while still training as a dancer.

To most people, those pursuits compete for the same hours. To Calero, they’re parts of one life.

“You just have to walk your path,” he says.

FROM THE GRIDIRON TO THE BARRE

Calero’s detour began at 14, when he suffered a concussion playing middle linebacker. Around the same time, a friend suggested he try ballet.

“At first I said, ‘Absolutely not,'” Calero recalls. “But I was into theater, and my older brother said, ‘If you want to be good at theater, then you need to learn dance.'”

He took the advice. Within three months of starting ballet, he earned a scholarship to the Joffrey Ballet School in New York City. That forced a choice between a traditional high school path and professional ballet training. He picked ballet.

“I’ve always been a risk-taker, so I decided that I was going to go for it,” Calero says.

The schedule was punishing. He trained at the Joffrey by day and attended a transfer high school into the night.

“I would do ballet from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Joffrey, and then run over to Union Square, 3:15 to about 9:30 p.m.,” he says. “Almost every day.”

A SECOND OBSESSION

As friends left for college, Calero found himself on a different timeline. Rather than finish high school the traditional way, he earned a high school equivalency diploma and enrolled in community college. He then auditioned for Indiana University’s ballet program at the Jacobs School of Music and transferred in February 2021.

By then, a second interest had taken hold.

“When I was 18, I learned about investing and financial literacy,” he says. “I’ve always been interested in trading options, but I didn’t quite understand it.”

At IU, he won admission to Kelley and began building the tools to understand it. He started with economic consulting, added business analytics consulting and eventually became a triple major – all while continuing his ballet training at Jacobs.

Calero doesn’t see a contradiction. “I don’t think it’s that far off,” he says of dance and markets. “I think it’s just about priorities.”

A trip to NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference sharpened those priorities. Calero came away convinced that the analytical skills he was building at Kelley could be paired with machine learning and data science and pointed at options trading and financial markets.

CHOOSING THE STAGE

Then came another fork. Calero was admitted to Duke University’s Master of Quantitative Management program. He also received his first professional contract, with the South Carolina Ballet.

He chose the stage.

A year later, he moved back to New York, where he now studies through Columbia’s Data Science Institute and is weighing a future master’s degree.

“Now I’m just looking to learn as much as I can at Columbia, apply that to my trading strategy, and meet like-minded individuals,” he says.

He hasn’t stepped away from dance. He still trains with his ballet instructor and keeps the door open to future professional work.

“It’s the same thing that I’ve been doing for many years,” Calero says. “It’s been a craft. It’s passion. It’s love. It’s just who I am.”

DANCE FIRST, DATA IN SUPPORT

Calero once pictured himself in consulting or quantitative finance. But seeing up close how professionals in those fields actually live changed his mind.

“In five years, I see myself still dancing professionally and kind of leveraging my academics as just another means to support the dance stream,” he says. “The career is so short. By the time you’re 30 or 35, it’s over.”

That clock shapes everything. A dancer’s window closes early; analytical skills and a trading strategy don’t. Rather than pick one passion over the others, Calero is building a life in which each one props up the rest.

At business schools where consulting, banking and corporate recruiting dominate the conversation, he makes the case for a different approach.

“Reject conformity. Embrace the unknown. Walk your own path,” he says. “The world is so big.”

And if that path doesn’t fit neatly on a résumé, Calero isn’t worried.

“If you love what you do, you’ll find a way to make it work,” he says.

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