Priscilla Rachun Linn

About Priscilla Rachun Linn

Priscilla Rachun Linn wrote her DPhil. thesis from Oxford on the festival cycle in the Mayan community of San Juan Chamula, Chiapas, Mexico. Her desire to share anthropology with a wider audience led her to becoming a museum professional for 40 years. In 1997 she was hired as the first curator for a diplomacy museum at the U.S. Department of State, where she worked for the last seventeen years of her career. Today the National Museum of American Diplomacy (diplomacy.state.gov) features a dynamic web presence and highly successful education program. The State Department anticipates its opening to the public within the next two years. In her retirement, Priscilla has been a volunteer for the Margaret McNamara Education Fund (mmeg.org), which provides higher education grants to women from lower income countries, and “curating” blogs for the Anthropology Career Readiness Network. Member: WAPA, AAM,

Are there helpful rules for working in a hierarchical environment?

Hierarchies are everywhere. Government, corporations, and academia all rely on structures that enable managers to allocate duties and evaluate employee performance. Employees know their responsibilities and the compensation they can expect based on the work they do. In writing this blog post, I am thinking about my experience and those of my practicing anthropology colleagues whose careers began at or transitioned into immense hierarchies. As a novice in the U.S. Department of State, a federal bureau, I had to generate my own unspoken “rules” to survive the challenges within this overwhelming behemoth. Fortunately, earlier in my life, I had begun [...]

How do you create a results-oriented resume?

Hopefully you know that a resume reveals who you are, what you can offer, and what you hope to get out of your professional life, now and in the future. A resume is a roadmap to finding work. When I created my first resume, I wrote it in the “I did this,” or a task-oriented format, which was standard back then. But things have changed, and now, stating information in results-oriented language has become essential. If you review your resume, you can ensure your writing captures your contributions in the workplace. So, what is results-oriented language and why is it [...]