Her first job after college was a bit unusual. She went to Cape Cod and worked as an assistant to a producer of experimental theatre for two summers and lived in NYC in the interim. She returned to school — Harvard this time — for a Maste of Arts in Teaching (MAT) and taught middle school English in the Gloucester public schools in Massachusetts. Then came a bigger move: Bogotá, Colombia, where she taught English at an international school and eventually became principal of the middle school.. Six years later, missing the four seasons (the seasons in Bogota were rain and not rain), she returned to Boston and made a career change. 
She earned a second master's, this one in Counseling Psychology, then spent two years as a child abuse and neglect investigator with the Massachusetts Department of Children’s Services.  In 1983 she began a long-distance relationship with an old friend and distant cousin, Walter White.  She returned to Nashville to begin studies at Vanderbilt for a doctorate in Human Development Counseling.  She and Walter married a year later; as a result she became a stepmother to Walter’s two sons, ages fourteen and ten at that time.  Their daughter, Christy, was born in 1988, and Susan received her doctorate and opened her own practice a year later.  She's been doing that work ever since. Today she's part of a counseling center with nine therapists. She specializes in working with couples and families and with traumatic life experiences. 

Something unexpected that not many people know about Susan is that she spearheaded a coalition of counselors in the 1990s that secured independent licensure for Licensed Professional Counselors.  As a direct result of this legislation, today there are 4600 LPCs in our state, providing competent mental health care in many different settings.  Susan also served for fifteen years as a member and later chair of the Tennessee Health-Related Board for Professional Counselors.