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Haylie Starling awarded $1,000 ‘What’s Your Story?’ essay contest scholarship

Four years ago, Haylie Starling found out she was going to have a baby after her nine-year marriage ended in divorce.

“I was working a part-time front desk job and did not know how to provide a life for a child,” she said. “I had no education, aside from a high school diploma and a few college courses. I started looking into going back to school.”

Although paying for tuition was a roadblock, Starling made the decision to enroll at Victoria College in Fall 2021. She and her boyfriend are raising their daughter, Gabriella Rocha (3), so she wanted to return to college to make a better life for her family and set a good example for her.

“As I was starting over at 27 years old, college was something I was thinking about and looking into,” she said. “Then, a couple of other people who had gone back to school later in life were talking to me about how it was good for them. They thought it would be a good option for me.

“When I looked into it, everything aligned. I thought, ‘I’m going to go back to college. It will be a great step for me, starting over completely and getting a degree so I can do something with it later.”

Starling, who is taking several online courses at VC, is on track to graduate with an Associate of Arts in December. She plans to continue on to the University of Houston-Victoria to pursue a degree in communications or communications design.

“I really like the design aspect,” she said. “I’d like to design something for brands or do social media design for a company’s marketing.”

Starling, who works as an admissions outreach coordinator for Martinsburg College, grew up in the small town of Carney, Oklahoma. Her father died of a heart attack when she was seven years old.

“My mother raised my younger sister and me by herself, mostly, with some help from others when needed,” she said. “Despite growing up in a single-parent household, I never saw myself as someone who had less than others. My mother worked hard to provide all the things we needed and most of what we wanted.”

After graduating from high school third in her class of 14 students, Starling enrolled at Northern Oklahoma College as an early childhood education major and first-generation college student. She dropped out in her second semester, got married and moved to Kansas, then to Victoria with her ex-husband.

“I had been wanting to go back to school for a while,” she said. “I had looked into it a couple of times when I was still married, but it was never the right time. There were always a lot of things going on.

“Victoria College has been such a great experience; everything about it has been great for me. When I went to college the first time, it felt like I had to go. This time felt much easier because I wanted to go.”

Starling benefits from being a member of VC’s KEY Center, a TRIO Student Support Services Program funded by the U.S. Department of Education, which provides an academically enriching and supportive environment for low-income, disabled and first-generation college students.

“I started going in there, talking to them, and taking advantage of all of the awesome things they do,” she said. “You can go in there and sit and do your homework, which I did multiple times when I needed somewhere to go and focus without anybody else around. They also offer tutoring. The KEY Center helped me out a lot.”

In June, Starling lost her mother to lung cancer, but she continued to work towards her degree while coping with her loss.

“She was in Oklahoma, and I had to deal with it from here,” she said. “My mother was always such a huge supporter of me and anything I wanted to do in life, so I want to make her proud, as well.”

Starling plans to participate in VC’s Spring Commencement Ceremony before moving on to UHV.

“I want to be able to show my daughter that it does not matter what life throws at you or how hard things seem at times, that if you work hard and strive to get to where you want to be, it does not matter how long it takes,” she said. “I want her to see that her mother did everything to make a better life for her and the two of us.”

As a result of sharing her journey, Starling recently earned a $1,000 scholarship as one of four winners of VC’s “What’s Your Story?” essay contest. No matter where her journey takes her, she knows that she will always be grateful for her time at Victoria College.

“I have learned so many valuable lessons, read many interesting books, and have begun to find out who I am as a person, aside from being someone's spouse, mother, daughter or friend,” she said.

“The knowledge I obtained throughout the last two years is insurmountable, and I am not sure where I would be in life had I not chosen to take a leap of faith and enroll back in college.”