Susan enjoys driving her 2003 GT convertible especially in nice weather. A small sample of Susan’s Madam Alexander doll collection.

It’s a popular commercial. A car is being off-loaded from a ship at a dock. A bystander asks the man who is watching the process if he couldn’t find a car he liked in Germany. The reply, “No. I couldn’t find a speed limit I liked in the States.”

Moments after Susan Koch, assistant professor of accounting, first saw this ad her hotel telephone started ringing. It was her husband, Stephan, who had just watched the same commercial. They shared a laugh over how perfectly it captured Susan’s attitude towards driving.

The commercial resonated on several levels with Susan. There was the idea of speed, the German connection since her husband is a native, and the featured car—a Ford Mustang.

The love affair with Mustangs started with her first car—a baby blue 1967 Fastback 289 three speed. Susan admits she loved that car. Someday, she vows, “I’ll have one just like it.”

Meanwhile she is content driving her 2003 GT convertible. Her husband, another Mustang aficionado, has a 2004 Mach I. Both are housed in the garage while the everyday vehicles have to make due with parking in the driveway.

Speed and automobiles are a small part of who this woman is.

Born in Alabama, Susan studied at the University of Alabama with little idea of what she wanted to do. After a brief hiatus she returned to UA to pursue a degree in accounting. In searching for a career, she knew she liked math but also wanted a job that allowed her to make money. The combination equaled accounting. Three degrees later she was finished.

One of her first career attempts was foiled at the very start. “I wanted to work with the FBI,” she recalls. “I wanted to go after white collar criminals, but to do that you had to be a special agent and I didn’t want to be a special agent.”

With no desire to work under those restrictions with the FBI, Susan turned her sights elsewhere. Teaching, especially on the collegiate level, was the logical choice. She taught at Troy State, Texas A & M, and Austin Peay, where she was prior to coming to Shippensburg in 2005.

Her arrival at Shippensburg was pure happenstance. One of her Austin Peay colleagues attended a conference in Florida. On his return, he couldn’t stop talking about the people he met who were from Shippensburg. When she asked where’s Shippensburg, his immediate response was, “I don’t know but I’m going to get a job there.”

“If you’re going, then so am I,” she responded.

In one of life’s ironies, Susan’s friend is still at Austin Peay.

The untimely death of her son was just one of the reasons she needed to leave Austin Peay. “I was in a bad place personally and needed a change. When I interviewed, I really liked all the people I met in the accounting department and I liked the focus on students. Since then, I am really glad I came to Ship. It’s a great department.”

Susan teaches Financial Accounting and Reporting and Auditing classes to accounting majors and especially likes the fact she gets to know her students over the two-year period. “I love my students and end up getting rather attached to them, although they might not realize that.”

One other thing her students may not realize is the hard time she has being firm with them. “I think if they knew I have such a hard time saying no they might not be so accommodating.”

She continues to pursue her interest in forensic accounting. It is a specialty that has gained in popularity since the scandals like Enron. According to Susan, forensic accounting has always been a part of auditing. It is by definition how to prevent and detect fraud but has evolved into a more investigative mode.

In her own way she is working toward going after those white-collar criminals who caught her attention years ago. She works as an unofficial consultant to the state of Tennessee and is on the board of the newly established Southeast Chapter of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. The association includes private investigators, law enforcement officials, as well as accountants.

This transplanted Southerner admits to missing real sweet tea and barbeque but otherwise enjoys the area. Friends have kindly pointed out the area hasn’t had a severe winter since her arrival, and that, she says, just may change her opinion of the Cumberland Valley.

It’s not all numbers for Susan Koch, assistant professor of accounting. In her free time she enjoys reading best selling novelists including Stephen King and SU alumnus Dean Koontz.

Besides the garaged Mustangs, Susan and her husband live in Carlisle with their two cocker spaniels—Hershey and Kara-mel.

While they live a pretty conventional life, their meeting and subsequent marriage were not. She met her husband playing on-line computer games. And that started when she would watch her son play. “I kept interrupting his game by asking him to talk to this character or that one. Finally, we created my own character and I started playing for myself.”

One of those characters she engaged with turned out to be her future husband. Their correspondence grew from the game to regular e-mails, telephone calls, and in-person meetings. Before their marriage, Susan spent a year in Germany to learn more about her future husband and his native country. Now she laughs, “I could live in Germany, but he has no desire to move back there.”

Although challenged to “sticking to a speed limit,” Susan’s other pursuits are rather tame. She maintains a collection of about 100 of the smaller Madam Alexander dolls (“The cute ones.”). She travels, usually to visit her daughter and grandchildren, Abbey 7 and Sam 2. And she is attracted to office supplies. That’s right—office supplies. “I’m not sure what it is, but I just love office supplies.”

Life is more than Mustangs for Susan. It’s a life filled with love for what she does, from speeding to teaching to family and all points in between.