[1][2] In October 1979, Baviera received her Bachelor of Science degree in Foreign Service, cum laude at the University of the Philippines.

In 1987, Baviera received a Master of Arts in Asian studies, specializing in China and East Asia.

[3] Before living in China, she was a leftist, but during her time there she "learned to recognize and shun the shallowness of political propaganda when I saw it, Mao's as much as Marcos's".

Until 1990, she taught at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of the Philippines and then until 1993 as a research coordinator at the Philippine-China Development Resource Center.

From June 1993 to May 1998, Baviera was head of the Center for International Relations and Strategic Studies of the Foreign Service Institute and taught parallel from 1996 to 1997 at the Faculty of Political Science of the Ateneo de Manila University.