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.
Tag: FSI
Back to School
I’ve just completed my first three weeks of Rangoon pre-departure training at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). The one-week courses were for mid-level consular managers and covered fraud and malfeasance (PC541), immigrant and nonimmigrant visas, (PC557), and American Citizens Services matters like crisis management and citizenship (PC558).
The Storm Before the Calm?
In mid-June, as I finished my fourth tour, my husband V and I took a quick weekend trip to South Carolina. The occasion was an engagement party for my eldest stepdaughter A, who in April had become engaged to her longtime partner B. The following weekend, seizing likely my last opportunity for the foreseeable future to visit the west coast, I flew out and spent two weeks with my parents. I’d worked out the leave before my training schedule began in earnest by offering to stay in Children’s Issues an extra six weeks to cover a staffing gap, provided I could take time off at the end.
The subtext of both trips felt a little “last hurrah.” Obviously not in the sense I wouldn’t see family again, but because I was preparing to buckle down into more than a year of full-time, in-person pre-departure training at the Foreign Service Institute. Taking leave during training usually isn’t feasible, particularly as I was starting the first couple months of my schedule with a series of short classes I needed to attend each day of. Unless I potentially tacked leave on to Christmas when FSI was closed or a rest stop during my PCS to Asia itself, outside of holiday weekends I would be unlikely to get back to the west coast before heading to my next tour in Burma.
I had envisioned my recent travels as vacation and relaxing family time, but predictably, they passed in a blur. While I was still the master of my own schedule and had a lot of fun, the past month didn’t exactly feel like down time. As my flexibility to be outside of Washington dwindled, I wondered if my trips were the calm before the storm, or the storm before the calm.
Zero Miles Later
Yesterday I ended my fourth tour in the Office of Children’s Issues. And as I’ve mentioned recently, in an end-of-tour first, I will be PCSing to exactly nowhere in the coming days. Since my orders are from a domestic assignment to an overseas assignment via long-term training, we’ll spend the next year living in our same house. I’ll just pivot from working in DC to working in Arlington. I won’t be entitled to PCS Lodging or per diem as I train up for my one-year assignment to Burma.
I’m telling myself it’s just a bonus that we won’t have to move three times in three years.
An End of Tour First…
…At least, for me. I am about three weeks away from finishing my fourth tour in the Office of Children’s Issues in Washington. I’m in a busy period of time at work. But it hasn’t escaped me that at this point during every prior tour, I was working and buried in preparations for Permanent Change of Station (PCS) moves.
By comparison, my to-do list now – while never finished – seems manageable. I do have some trepidation about going into 13 months of full-time training, particularly 10 months of Burmese language class. Going from 60% remote to 100% in-person will pose challenges too – logistical, mental, and personal. But for the time being, I’m grateful to wrap up a tour for the first time without the stress of an overseas PCS move looming days away.
PN250: Core Skills for Mid-Level Officers
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.
Fifth Tour Bidding: The Early Assignments Cycle
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.
Year in Review: 2020 Blog Stats and Recap
As longtime readers of this blog know, since I launched in April 2014 I have never missed a month. Sure, there were a couple of times where I posted on the last day of the month, but I have never gone a month without posting something. And I was not going to start 2021 by messing that up! I don’t know why it matters to me; it is not as if missing a month means I can never come back. People who know me would not be surprised by me adhering to this all-or-nothing mentality though. I guess it’s just the way I am. Lest you think I need rules to govern me entirely, I actually do still very much enjoy writing for this blog; it’s just that the last two months have passed in a blur of work and one crisis after another that have left me simultaneously exhilarated and wiped out, which are stories for another day. So here I am at the eleventh hour with a short recap of 2020 and blog stats for the year.
Ingratitude, and In Gratitude
I always know it has been too long between blog posts when too many half-developed ideas jumble together in my mind, clamoring to get out before they morph into something else with the passage of time. I try to think through my ideas, make them distinct, articulable, frame a coherent narrative from which I can draw conclusions. But sometimes it is not until I just release the words to the page, as it were, that the cross-currents of thoughts begin to flow in one direction and I understand what it is I want to say better than I could when I left it in my own mind. It is almost as if writing is my process of thinking; whether and to what extent I succeed in making a point is another matter.
This isn’t everything, but it’s all true.
Your Questions Answered, Volume V
It has been almost five months since the last edition of Your Questions Answered, so I thought I’d share some recent Q&A from the blog’s inbox, edited for length and clarity. In this edition, I’ll address how embassies decide which officers get language training (and how much), length of service vs. number of tours, whether officers serving on the U.S.-Mexico border can live on the U.S. side, and what consular officers do as they advance in their careers.
And as always, please remember these are my unofficial answers derived from my own experiences. Your mileage may vary.
Pandemic Packout
For the first time since early March, last Friday we welcomed other people into our home. But they weren’t guests; they were masked movers coming to pack so we could finally leave for Mexico, three months late to the day.
Leaving the Nest
Since we found out just over two weeks ago that Ciudad Juárez moved to phase one and our Permanent Change of Station (PCS) move could go forward, we have begun preparing to leave the United States in earnest. Finally knowing our departure date has allowed us to do so many things that have been tangled in knots since the shelter-in-place orders started in mid-March. We are now less than two weeks away from departing for Mexico, and although there is still a lot to do, I feel like we have it pretty well in hand.
Better Late Than Never
In the last 10 days, tremendous progress has been made towards our move to Mexico, which froze in time when the coronavirus pandemic lockdown started in March. First, U.S. Consulate General Ciudad Juárez transitioned from phase zero to phase one in what the Department calls the “Diplomacy Strong” framework, harking a continuous three-week decline in COVID-19 cases in Juárez and green-lighting moves for incoming officers. Second, we sought and received a packout date for later this month, freeing us to divide our possessions between air freight and car carry (since we are driving), and things we will finish, donate, or leave behind. These two key steps have unlocked all the tasks that we couldn’t do when we had no idea when we were leaving – post office change of address, purchasing a second car, planning our driving route and making reservations, and more.
Isolation, Day 87
Perhaps “isolation” is no longer the best way to characterize the way we are living, but in some regards it still feels very true. We continue to have the tedium of sanitizing all of our groceries and mail, wearing a mask when we go out, and trying to avoid touching any surfaces unnecessarily. But we have now made an effort to go outside more, venturing a 40 minute drive away for a hike at Mason Neck State Park in Lorton, VA. Wearing masks on the busy trail and later picking up takeout instead of going to our favorite local Mexican restaurant both highlighted the oddity of the times and made us grateful that things are starting to feel different. We also recently learned the gym in our building may reopen soon, with social distancing and mask requirements.
Today marks the 87th day of staying mostly home, teleworking, not seeing friends in person, and adjusting just about every aspect of our lives to avoid getting sick from the coronavirus. Although it’s good to self-isolate to protect ourselves, it can be really lonely.
Isolation, Day 60
Today marks the 60th full day since V and I went into self-isolation due to the coronavirus pandemic, and the end of the ninth remote work week. As we have hidden mostly indoors (and thankfully in an apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows), we have watched spring arrive in the Washington, DC area. With limited safe outdoor space close to our apartment, I have lamented “missing” one of my favorite seasons here. It isn’t yet hot and humid, and flowers, fresh breezes, and the occasional shower remind us to enjoy it while it lasts; the fetid swamp of DC summer will be here soon enough. Ordinarily, spring days here would be packed with people enjoying outdoor activities and spilling out onto sidewalks in packed brunch spots across the metro area.
But with the reality check of virus cases in northern Virginia continuing to rise and the Foreign Service summer transfer season postponed for a third time, I have tried to just accept the situation as it is and make the best of a lot of quiet time indoors.
