Cracking a Ph.D.

This book offers valuable insights into completing your Ph.D., and subsequently finding and excelling at a job. Further, it highlights other opportunities that a Ph.D. can offer, aside from the research and academic aspects. The book focuses on the five stages that Ph.D. candidates normally go through: joining a Ph.D. programme, starting a Ph.D. course, conducting research, writing their dissertation and finally, looking for the ideal job.


Serving as an extensive “cheat sheet”, it explains the options and choices that need to be made to join and complete a Ph.D. programme; setting expectations; selecting a research topic; celebrating the completion of a Ph.D. programme, and most importantly, how one can continue to develop after its completion. With a bonus chapter in each stage that describe the perspectives and expectations from different people or organizations, this book shares vital lessons, showing readers how to apply them to a range of situations to create a successful Ph.D. ecosystem.

Lindawati is a Ph.D. graduate that is currently working as a Manager (Industry Research and Development) in The Logistics Institute – Asia Pacific, National University of Singapore (NUS). She is passionate in learning and sharing her experience in her Ph.D. to encourage young people to pursue their higher education. In her free time, she loves coaching and mentoring students in their higher educations.


Prior in joining NUS, she worked in SAP, The Logistics Institute – Asia Pacific, National Management University (NUS), Living Analytics Research Center, Singapore Management University (SMU) and Bina Nusantara University (BINUS).


In SAP, she worked as a Researcher in SAP’s research center in Singapore. She initiated and led several research projects. In NUS, she joined as a Research Fellow. She managed research and industry projects in logistics and supply chain. She also involved in discussions with various industry players in logistics and supply chain and become speaker in several workshops organized by NUS. In SMU, she was a Research Engineer working on research project to improve visitors’ experience in Theme Park. She and her team conducted field studies to measure visitors’ experience and proposed an application to enhance this experience. In BINUS, she worked as IT Project Manager involved in a full life-cycle of IT Project Development and successfully implemented several IT systems for internal users. She was also a lecturer in Computer Science Department in BINUS where she conducted lessons in IT/IS courses. 


She got her Ph.D. degree from School Information Systems, Singapore Management University majoring in Intelligent Systems and Decision Analytics. She was awarded a full scholarship for her Ph.D. study. She focused her research on metaheuristics algorithm and proposed several techniques to automatically find optimum input parameters for metaheuristics algorithm. During her Ph.D., she also gained experiences in teaching by becoming a Teaching Assistant for 1 year. 


She got her Master degree from Master of Information Technology, University of Indonesia and her Bachelor degree from School of Computer Science, Bina Nusantara University, Indonesia. She also got a career scholarship for her undergraduate study.


Her major research interests are in analyzing, modelling and designing the Intelligent Systems based on operation research methods and optimization. These systems support business and management decision making by the application of Large-Scale Optimization and Meta-Heuristics Algorithm. Her works revolve around Supply Chain & Logistics, Smart Cities, e-commerce and Theme Park related activities. Her research is inspired by industrial problems gathered from field studies and discussions with industry partners. She dedicates much of her effort to solve these problems through the development and implementation of suitable systems. By so doing, she could achieve her goal of developing ideal system and fulfilling her passion in contributing to the body of knowledge. She has published technical papers and white papers related to her research interest.