Pancake earned a bachelor's degree in environmental design from Cornell University, and then studied anthropology at Louisiana State University. After working for the Peace Corps in Peru, she spent ten years in Guatemala studying the Maya peoples; for over six of these years she was curator of the Ixchel Museum of Indigenous Textiles and Clothing. However, the political unrest in Guatemala in the early 1980s caused her to return to the US, where she became a graduate student in engineering at Auburn University, the first woman in the program.