True meaning of Achievement

Achievement, surely does not sound like a new word to everybody. But how many of us truly understand the meaning of this word? You see, parents will often regards performance of their kids as their own achievements, while a wife will be proud over her husband's great achievement in office. But, again, what is achievement?

As I begin to continue my journey in higher education, I soon found myself surrounded in an academia environment that is totally different from the industry. Outsiders may think that academia is a fun world, less competitive, and the salary is of course, higher. I can assure you, this is the past. It's no longer the same as before, as for now.

Now, academia field is extremely important in order for any knowledge field to continue expanding and improving. Through researches, the knowledge of sciences and physics are continually applied solve current issues. This should, in return be contributing for a better humanity and further development of a nation. Yes, that's the origin of true academia world.

The rules of the game have been changed, as time progresses. Due to convenient of communication platform, and the vast growing numbers of researchers around the world, only those successful academicians are deemed worthy. As for the others, many continue as a less-known researchers. The mostly used tool to measure a success of a particular academician is 'publications'. Getting yourself involved in writing good quality journal papers is now the most vital key that determines his or her success. Numerous indexing introduced by large citation databases such as ISI Impact Factor, Scopus Citation Index, H-Index and etc., are now the commonly used tool to measure the influence capability of one academician.

I believe in the past, a researcher in university should be proud if he or her managed to get a paper published in journal. But the situation is a bit different by now. Even someone manages to publish in a journal, then others will ask "In what journal did you publish? Is it having any IF? What is your H-index?"

The pros of introducing such measuring techniques are that researchers will tend to motivate themselves into conduction proper research, and writing quality papers. The society and industry will then be able to gain continual improvements. Everyone is able to move forward. This is good, no doubt.

The cons? The value of publishing is deviated. It has become a platform for researchers to make themselves known by others. Instead of purely sharing knowledge through publications, strategical in planning the publication is more important that research itself. This causes an imbalance between doing, and writing.

But what can be said and done? Since the rule of game is so, we have to participate in and play by it. So, writing, writing, writing...is the only way for academicians to survive. At least, as for now.

Do you see now? Achievement can be something that is overwhelming such as landing on the moon, climbing Mt Everest, or as tiny as GETTING YOUR PAPER PUBLISHED.