Ami Burns – Having to be humble as an upper yardy

You have to be fairly humble. There was 18 of us ‘upper-yardies’ that’s what we’re called. What does that mean? That means that you’ve been in the Navy for an amount of time and you have been promoted from the Ranks and as a Chief Petty Officer you’re used to giving orders, you’re used to being in charge of a team, and when you go to Dartmouth, you are bottom of the food pile and that’s fine.

You know you just have to sort of swallow that pride and just say, “I have to do this to get to where I need to go” but also you can’t really complain, you’re being paid to go and do exercise for 30 weeks or whatever it was and actually you meet all of your peers that you’re going to be working alongside for the rest of your Naval career for the ones that stay.

And it’s really important that again to have the credibility in the Ward Room, it’s really important to have gone through that with them so that when you are then presented to the Ward Room, where the Officers are, that you’ve done Dartmouth. You’ve done it, you’ve completed it, you’re competent. You know that’s the sort of baseline that we all start in.