Category: Leadership & Work Culture

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture

Sixth Tour Bidding: Showing Up

by pennypostcard • December 10, 2025 • 0 Comments

When the U.S. government closed for more than six weeks this autumn, it completely blew up the Foreign Service bid-season timeline for summer 2026 bidders. Summer 2026 bidders are those of us completing our assignments next summer who need an onward. Our bid cycle was meant to begin at the end of September 2025, with bids due in October and handshakes coming out in November.

But as the shutdown dragged on through October and into November without appropriations, bidding—an activity not deemed “excepted”—was at a full stop. Posts and bureaus weren’t permitted to interview candidates, and bidders couldn’t express interest in projected vacancies. In an attempt to create parity between excepted employees who were working without pay and non-excepted employees who had been furloughed and weren’t allowed to sign on during the lapse, the organization even took the portal used for most bidding activities offline, cutting off bidders’ visibility on capsule descriptions for open assignments.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, Peace Corps, U.S.

The Pendleton Act: Learning Burmese, Weeks 24-26

by pennypostcard • March 6, 2025 • 2 Comments

Last Friday marked the end of week 26 of my Burmese program. Now 59% complete, we’ve shifted from everyday topics like our biographies, weather, and travel to work-related themes such as peace and security, bilateral relations, human rights, natural disasters, and the global economy.

Just weeks ago, my biggest challenges—less individual instruction time after our class merger last November and preparation for our upcoming PCS move to Burma this summer—felt significant.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

Suggested Tips for Language Study at FSI

by pennypostcard • October 8, 2024 • 6 Comments

Last month, I attended a seminar on study tips offered to current language students by the Foreign Service Institute’s (FSI) School of Language Studies (SLS). At any given point, hundreds of Foreign Service Officers are engaged in long-term language training at FSI. Successfully reaching the required scores for our overseas language-designated onward assignments is “the why.”

I’ve aggregated here some of my favorite language study tips from SLS consultants, fellow students, and my own experience. I’ve categorized them into two groups: strategy (what you do) and mindset (how you approach what you do), though the division is probably subjective. If you have a favorite tip for succeeding in FSI language study, feel free to add it in the comments!

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

But Who’s Counting?

by pennypostcard • September 3, 2024 • 1 Comment

Last week marked the eighth consecutive week of summer tradecraft training that bridged the end of my tour in Children’s Issues to the start of Burmese language studies. It also marked the final week.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

Happy Centennial, Foreign Service

by pennypostcard • May 18, 2024 • 2 Comments

May 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the modern United States Foreign Service. It doesn’t mark the beginning of American diplomacy, which traces back to the beginning of our young union, but rather the passage of the Rogers Act of 1924. The Rogers Act, also known as the Foreign Service Act of 1924, joined the diplomatic and consular services of the United States. (Personnel of the former staffed embassies and legations around the world; the latter primarily promoted trade relations overseas and assisted distressed U.S. sailors – a precursor to today’s American Citizens Services consular work.)

The two services had evolved separately under former Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, and in merging them the provisions of the Rogers Act created a more merit-based Foreign Service. The new structure provided more reliable pay, a guaranteed rotation process to keep officers from “going native” in their countries of assignment (complete with mandated stateside home leave between foreign tours), and updated policies around officer selection, promotion, and retirement.

Foreign Service, Health, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

PN250: Core Skills for Mid-Level Officers

by pennypostcard • April 30, 2024 • 2 Comments

Two weeks ago I went “back to school,” attending a weeklong mid-level training focused on strategic decision-making at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). I hadn’t been on campus since March 2020, four months before we ultimately left for my third tour in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. An FSI leadership training had been the last scheduled course I’d managed to attend before Foreign Affairs Counterthreat Training (FACT) was cancelled due to COVID and we went into lockdown in our PCS Lodging apartment.

Four years later, in spring 2024, FSI looks both the same and somehow changed to me. Since I’ve been gone, construction has started – and finished – on the new B Building. The resultant space is modern and light-filled. Flowering trees and daffodils dot the landscape in pinks and yellows. Green grass lawns stretch like taut carpets, connecting the cafeteria to its adjacent counterpart structures and hosting the perfect place for jeans-clad students to read, eat, or throw a frisbee around.

But as I came back to FSI, I couldn’t help but think the bucolic scenery seemingly belied the terrible reality the world – and our workplace – have seen since 2020. However much things have changed and are now attempting to boomerang back, they can’t truly return to what they once were. Not for me. And yet here we are. Like all successful creatures, we adapt and keep going. This trial run going to FSI for a week was as much a test for me of my current logistical and life skills (and how ready I am for a year of a slow roller coaster that builds and builds) as it was the core skills the Department sought to impart through PN250.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

Diplomacy 1, Hacker 0… Part II

by pennypostcard • March 17, 2024 • 1 Comment

In my previous blog post, I began to tell the March 2023 story of how a hacker took over my Facebook account. If you missed it, I recommend reading Part I at the link before reading Part II. At the end of Part I, I’d left my tale of woe on a cliffhanger after reaching out to the hacker who had gained access to my Facebook account and locked me out.

The hacker had changed the phone number associated with my account before the primary email address. So I’d been notified via email of his real phone number. It had a Nigerian country code, and I’d found the number active on WhatsApp. The location data Facebook had sent me associated with the new primary phone number for my account indicated the hacker was in Southern California using an iPhone 6S. I wasn’t sure if he was actually in California or perhaps in Nigeria using a VPN to obfuscate his location. I was inclined to think the latter, given his iPhone was about eight generations behind. But at that point, it didn’t really matter in practical terms. He was in and I was out. I had fallen for a dumb scam thinking I was talking to a friend I’d known since 1999 when in fact, it was a total stranger.

Weighing the risk he might try and extort or blackmail me against the fact Facebook had locked down my account and he couldn’t see my personal info anyway, I decided to see what would happen if I contacted him directly.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

Diplomacy 1, Hacker 0… Part I

by pennypostcard • March 16, 2024 • 3 Comments

Recently I was talking with some colleagues at a happy hour about ‘pig butchering,’ one of the more nefarious financial scams to emerge from Asia in recent years. In the high-tech long con, a stranger grooms an unsuspecting target through social media or text messages to invest in cryptocurrency. Like fattening a pig for slaughter, the ‘friend’ gradually convinces the target to trust in the relationship enough to take investment advice. After some encouraging returns, the target’s confidence grows. But what the pig butchering victim believes is the beginning of a lucrative opportunity crumbles once they’ve sunk in the desired margin of cash, and the stranger they thought was their friend vanishes with their money.

Sounds dumb, right? Who responds to an unsolicited text or chat from someone they don’t know? Let alone becomes their friend, let alone then sends them money? I was surprised to find out how pervasive this has become.

Australia, Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, Mexico, Uzbekistan

Consular Officers Have the Best Stories, Part I

by pennypostcard • June 28, 2023 • 4 Comments

When I joined the Foreign Service as a consular officer, future colleagues said to me, “Oh, consular officers have the best stories!”

“Oh yeah?” I smiled.

“Sure. Between the visa fraud, emergency passports, natural disasters, and American citizens getting arrested overseas, there’s no shortage of stories. I once visited this U.S. citizen in jail, you wouldn’t believe what happened with this guy…”

Oh boy, I thought. Tell me. I can’t wait.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture

Your Questions Answered, Volume VIII

by pennypostcard • June 25, 2023 • 4 Comments

I have been doing better at keeping up with blog email and generating Your Questions Answered posts, publishing the latest edition just a month ago. In this edition, I will talk about becoming an FSO in your late 40s, the medical clearance process and whether there is a physical fitness requirement, the difference between generalists and specialists, concerns about how the FS lifestyle can affect families and children, and the high cost of living in DC during a domestic assignment.

As always, the answers to these questions are my personal views and don’t necessarily constitute policy or the views of the Department. You get what you pay for – and this is all free! Enjoy, and feel free to send your own questions to askcollectingpostcards@gmail.com. I will answer questions directly first, and maybe later publish them (always anonymously and without attribution) on the blog. If I owe you an answer, it’s still coming – I promise!

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture

Fifth Tour Bidding: Bids Are In

by pennypostcard • June 16, 2023 • 3 Comments

The summer 2024 early assignments bid cycle is drawing to a close, with Special Incentive Post (SIP) bids due today and domestic Long-Term Training and Development (LTTD) bids due right after the holiday weekend.

My statements of interest are in. Lobbying, consultations, and interviews all completed. I’ve entered less than half a dozen bids into all the right platforms and rank-ordered them, and I’ve drafted thank you notes for references and interviewers. There’s no action for me other than to see what happens, and that feels pretty good. We’ve now arrived at my favorite part of the bidding season: the part where I don’t need to do any more work, and am free to anticipate the possibility of any of my bids materializing into a handshake.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture

Fifth Tour Bidding: The Early Assignments Cycle

by pennypostcard • May 16, 2023 • 7 Comments

As I mentioned in my previous post previewing bidding strategies for my upcoming fifth tour, the regular bid season won’t officially get underway until early autumn. But there are some aspects of bidding that start sooner – besides anxiety, networking, and planning – that I didn’t mention. Two of those aspects make up what we call the “early assignments cycle.”

I’m referring to Special Incentive Post (SIP) bidding and Long-Term Training and Detail (LTTD) bidding. The SIP and LTTD bid cycles are abbreviated, occurring before the regular bid cycle so the Department can quickly lock in handshakes for jobs at its highest-priority or most difficult-to-staff posts, as well as external detail and academic positions, respectively, a few months before regular bidding begins. If you receive an SIP or LTTD assignment, your bidding is done and you can watch everyone else sweat it out!

I don’t have a lot of experience with either SIPs or LTTDs. I tried to bid SIP posts from Australia during third tour bidding in 2018, but as an untenured second tour officer bidding mid-level for the first time, the experience was so unsuccessful and short-lived I don’t think I even mentioned it on the blog. And last time I bid in 2021 I didn’t really understand what LTTDs were; most of them were offered above my rank at that time. Finding out about how LTTDs work now has been a little like discovering a hidden level of a video game I thought I’d already scoped out and understood.

This time around I plan to throw my hat in the ring for both SIP and LTTD jobs. This isn’t because I don’t want any jobs in the regular bid cycle – much to the contrary, I have my eye seriously on at least a dozen of the projected vacancies! I just want to try something new and see what happens. I’ve learned a long time ago in the Foreign Service not to self-adjudicate out of opportunities. Maybe SIP or LTTD will work out and maybe they won’t, but in the meantime, here are some of my unofficial, bidder perspectives on the process. A note that none of the information in this post is intended to constitute instructions or policy.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture

Your Questions Answered, Volume VII

by pennypostcard • May 6, 2023 • 1 Comment

I can’t believe it has been two years since the last time I wrote a YQA post! I have certainly answered many emailed questions to the blog since then, so I’m eager to share some of them in the hopes it might answer a question you have about the Foreign Service.

In this post I will address how prepared I felt for my first diplomatic tour and why, my policy on Zoom calls with prospective FSO candidates, what in my background led me to the FS, a link to my candidacy study tips, my views on how stressful this career is, how I think high school students could prepare for the Foreign Service, and the book I read about this career that inspired me.

In a future volume of YQA, I will focus on questions about how the Foreign Service lifestyle affects an officer’s family members.

Foreign Service, Health, Leadership & Work Culture, Mexico, Travel, U.S.

Year in Review: 2022 Blog Stats and Recap

by pennypostcard • April 12, 2023 • 1 Comment

For me, 2022 was a profoundly strange year, filled with ups and downs. We finalized adopting our cat and moved from Mexico to Virginia, I succeeded in my 100-lb weight loss goal, took a road trip to Florida, started my fourth tour in Washington, DC, and visited the west coast three times in one year. I got promoted, saw my favorite band live, took fun beach trips with my husband, and took a family trip to Europe. But I also was knocked off-center by the traumatic death of an old friend, struggled at times to learn my new job, and dealt with illness – both my own and that of multiple family members.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

Who’s Who at Main State: A Scavenger Hunt

by pennypostcard • January 29, 2023 • 2 Comments

Last fall, our team in the Office of Children’s Issues paused our regular international parental child abduction casework and bilateral portfolios for a daylong retreat. In addition to team-building exercises and an in-depth examination of our processes to see where we might improve internal coordination and workflow, we also took a 10-minute walk over to the main State Department building near 23rd and C Streets in northwest Washington, DC.

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