My disillusion with credentialism reached its peak when I published my first paper as an undergraduate student. That paper was based on a project I'd worked on

My disillusion with credentialism reached its peak when I published my first paper as an undergraduate student. That paper was based on a project I'd worked on part-time for maybe half of a semester. After my professor pushed for me to write a paper about it, I obscured the subject matter with the adequate specialist jargon and convoluted technical style and it was accepted by a fairly well-regarded publication uneventfully. I was on an accelerated curriculum planning to pursue a Master's degree and had much higher expectations for academia. I ended up dropping out after earning my Bachelor's. I'm much more sympathetic to independent researchers than to academics these days, and if I were to engage in serious research again, I would probably publish it independently rather than going through academic channels.