Yagmur-Valdez: A future enterpreneur

Antelope Valley High School Class of 2020 graduate Victoria Yagmur-Valdez plans to major in business administration to fulfill her dream of being an entrepreneur.

If that does not work out, she has other plans.

“I’ll be completely satisfied with anything helping people with their financial struggles, making sure that they have a bright future,” Yagmur-Valdez said.

Teacher Rebecca Bartolome said Yagmur-Valdez is one of those students who appreciates how her mom Sonia Valdez, made sacrifices to raise her properly.

“She tries the hardest to be a model student not only for a better future for herself, but to make her mom the proudest parent,” Bartolome said.

Yagmur-Valdez said her mom was a single parent and did struggle.

“She did need help raising me,” she said. “Luckily she has some help from my grandparents. I try my best to be the best I can be for my mom because I know that’s what she wants for me. I want to make sure I satisfy her in whatever I do. She’s done so much for me, I just want to make sure I give back to everything she’s done for me. All the sacrifices, everything.” Valdez is proud of her daughter.

“She’s gone through some stuff and she’s been able to overcome those obstacles in her life and everything else. She graduated and she’s amazing,” she said.

Yagmur-Valdez, 18, joined AV High’s Forever Friends Club as a freshman. The club’s members focus on friendships with the school’s special education students.

“The job of our club was to actually include them into the school life,” she said.

Sonia Valdez works as a clerk at AV High. Yagmur-Valdez

said having her mom on campus has its pros and cons.

“She’s right in the front office, so if I ever need anything she’s right there,” Yagmur-Valdez said.

Valdez also knows her daughter’s teachers. “I never am, but if I’m ever bad in class, the teacher can kind of call my mom and be like, ‘Hey, your daughter’s being really bad in my class,’” Yagmur-Valdez said, laughing.

She said her mother also kept a watchful eye on her grades.

Yagmur-Valdez joined AV High’s Green Enterprise Engineering Academy as a freshman.

“I fell in love with how much the teachers truly cared about the students,” she said.

Students in the program take the same classes together for all four years of high school.

“The relationship we got at the end of four years was absolutely incredible,” Yagmur-Valdez said. “We were no longer peers. We were family.”

She was Bartolome’s GE Engineering Innovations Academy student at AV High. Bartolome served as Yagmur-Valdez’s engineering teacher on different levels for the past three years.

“Over the time, I was consistently impressed with her work ethics in the classroom,” Bartolome wrote in an email. “She is very dedicated in accomplishing the assignments that are given to her in a very timely and accurate manner. She is a pleasure to have in the classroom for her positive attitude and her collaborative nature during class projects. She is very patient and very critical on how she completes her work. She is a very good critical thinker and an innovator. She is one who is willing

to give a hand to her peers if necessary to accomplish their task.”

Yagmur-Valdez served as treasurer for the AV High’s SWENext 2020 (Society of Women Engineers) and was a member of the AV High’s Femineer Club (female engineers).

“She stays after school almost every day to help with accomplishing the projects for the above mentioned organizations,” Bartolome wrote. “With all her school work and extra activities, she also is a Senior Mentor for the freshmen students in the academy.”

Math teacher Bethlehem Cayetano called Yagmur-Valdez a stellar young woman.

“She is a hard worker, studies constantly and is a part of her church youth group as a peer minister,” she wrote. “I had the pleasure of having her in my math classes the past two years. She is dedicated, smart, a leader and very humble. I will whole-heartedly miss her and she will accomplish great things in the future and I am so lucky to have had her in my class. She is a wonderful young woman who was a part of our Green Enterprise Engineering Academy, and she excelled in our program, built great relationships with students and staff. She is a model student.”

Yagmur-Valdez will be freshman this fall at Antelope Valley College. She got a head-start this summer, taking two classes via remote learning.