Patricia Parsons Kay correspondence

Patricia Parsons Kay entered Bates as a freshman in the fall of 1960 and lived in Wilson House. After her freshmen year, she transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in part because of her parents' promise of a junior year abroad if she moved back to Wisconsin.

Patricia spent 1962-63 studying abroad with the University of Wisconsin-Madison's new junior year abroad program in Aix-en Provence, France. She and her former Wilson House roommate, Linda Rolfe Raiss (Bates class of 1964), became roommates again as Linda was spending her junior year abroad as an independent student studying at the Institute for Foreign Students in Aix-en-Provence.

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1964 with a B.A. degree in history and French, Patricia earned a teaching certificate and, with her husband Stafford Kay, went to Kenya with the Peace Corps. They spent 2 1/2 years teaching high school before returning to the United States. Upon completion of her master's degree in library science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, they returned to Kenya, where Patricia taught first grade and ran a makeshift library and her husband taught at Kenyatta University.

After leaving Kenya, they travelled to Australia where Patricia worked as a school librarian and her husband taught at Monash University in Melbourne. In 1980 they moved to Bethesda, Maryland and Patricia became the librarian at the Australian Embassy in Washington DC, retiring in 1997.