 My name is Senior Airman Christina Schneider. I'm a firefighter for the Air National Guard. My name is Brett Yocum. I'm a C-17 load master in the 164th Air Lift Wing in Memphis, Tennessee. My name is Master Sergeant Dan Keller. I'm the Chief of Weapons and Tactics at the 124th ASAS. Senior Master Sergeant Jonathan Sotomayor. First Sergeant, 2nd Red Horse. My chief called while I was in the labor and delivery room and told me I won Airman of the Year right before I delivered my daughter. Chief Bolton calls and he's like, man, I don't know where you are, but you better come to your office. He goes, I'm here with the wing commander. So then I walk in and they're all staring at me. And I by then have sweated completely through my flight suit. And then they wind up telling me, hey, congratulations. You're nominated as the NCO of the year. I was surprised when I received this award. It's not a huge surprise, mostly because of the senior NCOs here foster that level of competency internal of the people that they mentor. In addition to that, the way the chiefs ensure that whenever they do have someone inside their wing that they're going to push forward. A lot of extra time goes into it. I found out while I was here at work, our commander received a phone call from our command chief informing him. And he basically put it on speakerphone to congratulate me. So that's how I found out. Later in life, I joined the guard. If you have a dream that you want to accomplish, despite people discouraging me, if that's something you would like to achieve, just go for your goals and your dreams. Because like I said, I was enlisting when I was 39 years old. I've accomplished a lot in the last few years. I have NCOs and senior NCOs that I look up to that have taught me things that I need to know to be successful. And all I am is just a product of all of those people all together. So I'm humbled to be able to represent that. As a first sergeant, you absolutely have the power to shape the Air Force and the Air National Guard. But I would even go as far as saying Airmen had the power to shape the Air National Guard and the Air Force. Something I think about a lot was something that got hammered into us early on in the combat control pipeline was exceeding the standard is the standard. There's going to be standards and everything, but that should never be the goal.