Patricia Walters earned her BA in Linguistics and an MA in TESOL from UCLA and launched her career with two years at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences as an English language teacher in Beijing, PRC. She then spent 6 years as an in-house intercultural communications training consultant at Seiko EPSON Corporation in Nagano, Japan, facilitating the overseas assignments of Japanese staff. Since then, she has been at the English Language Center, Michigan State University as Student Advisor and Associate Director. Her primary areas of focus are on student affairs and student welfare which includes providing cross-cultural communication training and consultation for both domestic students and staff as well as for international students.