Business Management to Psychology Research

Psychology was the original plan. At the end of secondary school, it was the intended direction — the field that seemed to hold the most fundamental questions about human behaviour. The discovery of partial colour-blindness changed that. In Indonesia, colour vision deficiency closes the door not only to medical and design programmes but to psychology as well. Economics was what remained after those doors closed.

That 'detour' lasted twenty-two years — and produced a career in insurance risk, a peer-reviewed publication, a commendable GM role, and an unconventional Sharia unit & spinoff project leadership. The UNICAF scholarship to LJMU in 2024 was the first moment the original door reopened. The path back was longer than anticipated. The questions that drove the original interest had only deepened in the interval.

Insurance's core product is peace of mind — which means its real substrate is psychology. Both fields ask the same underlying question: how do human beings manage uncertainty, assign value, and calibrate trust? Two decades of building insurance systems turned out to be two decades of applied observation in exactly that domain.

The research direction emerged from the same interval. Twenty-two years as a Buddhist-identified professional inside Indonesian corporate institutions — Catholic-schooled, working in environments where Dharmic minority identity is routinely misclassified — generated specific questions about recognition, legitimacy, and how people see what is different from them. Those questions became Beyond Tolerance.