Knowledge Management and Student Services

The connection between the knowledge that a university makes and distributes easily links with the ideas of knowledge management in technical communication. University organizations are often large and decentralized; campus departments make rich case studies for the technical communication researcher to study the university organization with regard to managing knowledge. Of particular interest is how the administrative functions of the university, situated in a knowledge environment, manage their own knowledge individually, organizationally, and structurally.

A Smidgen of Knowledge History
The invention of the assembly line in the early 1900s revolutionized the way that people worked. Workers who used to be individual craftsmen became groups of factory workers, and people transitioned from making individual products to working as a part of a large organization to produce products in large quantities. Knowledge in the Industrial Age was held by the factory owners who understood the big picture of the many tasks while the workers understood their specific job. The Industrial Age moved to the service, or information, economy after World War II. Again, workers transitioned, this time from making products to delivering services. One illustrative example about the transition to the service economy is described in Central Works in Technical Communication, edited by Johnson-Eilola and Selber. It used to be that to bake a cake the baker would purchase the raw ingredients and bake the cake using the knowledge of how to measure and combine the ingredients to make a cake. Once manufacturing began, consumers could buy a cake in a box, follow a few directions without knowing the whole process, and bake a cake. In the service economy, the consumer can go to the grocery store or a bakery and purchase a cake, remaining unaware of the cake-making process. Managing the knowledge in today's organizations can give organizations a competitive edge in providing goods and services to their customers.

Knowledge Management in the Student-as-consumer Environment

In this service economy, also known as the Information Age, students expect value for their money. They want excellence in their education. They want services for their tuition dollars. They want jobs after graduation because they pay “your salary.” How is this intangible service, the transfer of knowledge, measured? Colleges and universities struggle with this idea in a customer-centered environment and define their missions using meaningless words, like excellence. Bill Readings points out in University in Ruins that, “As an integrating principle, excellence has the singular advantage of being entirely meaningless, or to put it more precisely, non-referential” (p. 22). The standard of excellence is not able to be defined consistently; it is not quantifiable in a standard way, yet all of the departments in a university must manage to keep customers, students, happy. In the field of technical communication, this user-centered focus is a goal much like the goal to keep students happy as consumers; after all, either a student or a user of a website, product, or service can take their dollars elsewhere. But as in design and usability work for technical communicators, administrators in colleges and universities face similar tensions between what the customer wants and what the customer needs. What the user says might not be what is best for the user. The same is true for the student.

Students enter formative years of development when they enter college. The experience at colleges and universities are transformative for students, whether they are traditionally aged or adult students. While the developmental needs may differ based on a number of factors, including the age of the student, developmental needs are still there, just the same. The response of a university professional versed in student developmental theories cannot always align with what the student-as-consumer may want.

Student Services Professionals and Knowledge Management

Universities are places where knowledge management is particularly important since higher education is a knowledge factory, of sorts. Universities deal in the creation, production, and distribution of knowledge to students in classrooms, through research, and using co-curricular opportunities for learning outside of tradition academic spaces. It is in these co-curricular spaces, outside of the classroom, where knowledge management is examined. The knowledge work of student services professionals, applying student development theory to practice, is like that of knowledge management in technical communication. Contextual action using information is applied, communicated, shaped, and understood. Toward the goal of holistically educating the student to become knowledgeable in their disciplines and contribute as good citizens to campus and society, student service professionals can investigate knowledge management as a leadership strategy to deliver quality services to students.

Defining Knowledge Management in the Student Services Organizations

With decentralized structures, universities can use knowledge management strategies to deliver seamless services to students. A second benefit to applying knowledge management strategies to student services information is that with student leaders in place and young professionals in front-line positions in organizations, codified information that is well documented and made explicit will preserve the progress that a department has made in serving students. In a student services organization, there are three places where information lives: with the individual, in the department, and in the structure of the organization.

Individual Knowledge

Individual knowledge resides with an individual staff member in a student services organization and is the least stable type of information. If the staff member leaves the organization, knowledge leaves with that person if it not shared with other staff members or written down. Without distributed knowledge in practice or in writing, the staff member’s departure leaves an information gap in the organization. Knowledge management strategies for capturing information from that staff member’s experiences benefits students, remaining staff members, and the university as a whole.

Departmental Knowledge

Situated between individual knowledge and structural knowledge, departmental knowledge is more stable than individual, but less so than structural. Departmental knowledge is shared knowledge that exists in practice. Strong team relationships on the student services staff or in student organizations allow for the transmission of knowledge among the group members. This social sharing of information can be replicated in the event that a staff member or student leaves the organization. Organizational practices survive because the group knows some or most of the knowledge that the departing staff member possessed.

Organizational Knowledge

This is the most stable of the types of knowledge. Organizational knowledge lives in the systems, tools, and artifacts of a student services staffs functions. Documented information made explicit for anyone to use or read characterizes this type of knowledge. In Hughes’ article, “Moving from Information Transfer to Knowledge Creation: A New Value Proposition for Technical Communications,” the author describes system-level knowledge:

Organizational knowledge is knowledge that resides at the enterprise level. It is the knowledge that is embedded in the processes, practices, tools, and repositories within the enterprise. As such, it is the most durable, being the least dependent on the persistence of persons and personalities (p. 279).

These levels of knowledge management should be considered further in a student services organizational setting. Using ethnographic methods that support a genre-tracing methodology, knowledge management in student services can be investigated at the individual, departmental, and organizational levels to better understand how student services staffs improve services and operations using knowledge management theories and practices.

Follow Up to the Unlikely Mash-Up of HTML5 and Student Affairs

The ideas of HTML5 and student affairs take time to make the connections in my brain, and I found myself thinking of my post from yesterday about how these two topics, HTML5 and student affairs work, continue to connect:

Tech comm and student affairs professionals value accessibility, diversity, and inclusion

Another place where I was able to make connections between HTML5 and the field of student affairs is in the way that the ideals of accessibility, diversity, and inclusion are promoted. In his book about HTML5, Keith advocates the use of graceful degradation in design where needed, but calls for the use of assistive technology wherever possible; to use these techniques as standard pieces of design. At colleges and universities, there are offices and services dedicated to those who require assistive technologies for learning. In the physical and technological classrooms, this is a natural place where the two fields meet.

This idea of access is wider than the use of assistive technologies and writing good code so that users with disabilities can view or hear web pages. Both fields struggle to provide the kind of access that all people need when it comes to diversity and technology, though both value inclusion. In universities, graduation rates are still lower for people of color than for white students, as reported in the Texas Tribune and reprinted in the January 1, 2011 New York Times article, Universities Are Challenged as Demographics Shift. "Nationally, 52 percent of Hispanic students and 58 percent of black students are unable to earn a bachelor’s degree in six years, compared with 40 percent of white students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics." For student affairs professionals, the need to provide services to students is great and offices of diversity and inclusion can include services that are technological in nature. Similarly, the professionals in our university offices that serve our students of color, and beyond just the offices dedicated to the delivery of services, should understand that today's students communicate and learn differently. As my Illinois Institute of Technology college Chris de Kok said today, "Gone are the days of the laptop on the desk from the nineties. People are using mobile devices all over campus to tap into our services. We need to be ready for that level of access."

HTML5 and Student Affairs: An Unlikely Mash-up That Just Might Work

I am reading HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith and I feared that I was at opposite ends of my dissertation mash-up topics of technical communication and student affairs. While I am certain that, in general, technical communication principles and practices can improve performance of student affairs professionals, I struggle with how writing and designing web pages improves service to students as a student affairs professional. Maybe this is one place where my mash-up does not work. On the other hand, here are some thoughts as to why it might:

Both fields value openness and freedom and I can express my leadership style through these principles

Using digital communication tools is imperative for me in my position, and by learning to communicate digitally I can round up, organize, and deliver information in ways that are open and helpful to my staff. The information available to my staff needs to be be malleable, and this is where my professional values as a student affairs professional mesh with values in the open source and technical communication communities. Open source software is a philosophy that frees software documentation and makes it available for users to use, change, and redistribute. The GNU Project defines this freedom: "'Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer.'” Finding the commonality if the professional values helps me share information with my staff and encourage them to use the information, change the information and redistribute the information. One practical application of this is creating a wiki for training for the student employees. While there will be a page or two without writing permissions, emergency procedures for example, the wiki will be open for students and staff to use, create, edit, and change content. It allows us to push information in a more real-time fashion, something that students value.

Taking classes in technical communication has helped me to treat information differently. Information is a resource that is essential for the success of my organization in the McCormick Tribune Campus Center. With over 10,000 events and six-times as many "touches" to events in any part of the event-cycle, I need people and systems that can communicate what they know at critical moments for information delivery in ways that are easily understandable.

Working at a tech school, this knowledge helps me find common ground with students

In my role as a director of a campus center at a a technical institution, my students talk in code all of the time. And it is not just HTML code in which they speak. At a tech school, there are conversations about science-fiction, fantasy, video-gaming, mathematics, music, and many other intellectual pursuits that I am less familiar with, having come from a liberal education background.

By taking classes in writing and designing for the web, I have something in common with my students. This is no small thing in common, either. By taking classes, not only do we have an intellectual platform that we share, but as an administrator, I find that I am in tune with students' schedules even more. Sure my life has always revolved around the academic calendar, but when I am in classes, it does so even more. I am well aware of the stressful times of the semester and can balance that with expectations for staff while still challenging them to balance all that they have committed to.

In general, digital literacy improves my ability to communicate and helps me to do my job

My education in the area of technical communication, it opens new theoretical doors and I am able to view my student affairs position differently. We write considerable amounts in our positions in student affairs. In addition to the many e-mails we write on a daily basis, we write training documents, position descriptions, monthly reports, justification documents, and much more. By investigating theories of design, audience, knowledge management, and usability, I can apply this to what I do in my job. I can be more persuasive and advocate for my area. I can be clearer in my communication. I can relate concepts to my staff in ways that are understandable.

This semester, I will take a class that will help me create web applications. As I read the HTML5 book, I am taking notes about what apps I could create that may help the employees or the users of the student center. Writing digitally can help me improve my services for the students, faculty/staff, and community users of the campus and conference services.

Inclusion

From a student affairs perspective, the word "inclusion" is significant in the field. Leadership specialists, cultural and diversity offices, and student activities offices all use this word to promote campus community and increase student retention. Having been in student affairs for 20 years, I have witnessed ideas and practices of inclusion. I could root this post by including theory and research that would support my claims, but for now I want to use the word inclusion to talk about how this concept in student affairs ties specifically to technical communication.

A few articles have gotten me thinking about this idea of inclusion as it relates to my dissertation. I am looking for areas where the two fields connect, intersect, and benefit from each other. Using the word inclusion as an intersection point, the fields touch in important ways. Student affairs professionals are not always seen as core to the academic mission of an institution and are sometimes described as extracurricular. This was a struggle that we talked about in my grad classes back in the day (my day being 20 years ago as I mentioned earlier). In his article, "Horizontal and Vertical Structures: The Dynamics of Organization in Higher Eduction," Fenske describes the challenges for student affairs professional in 1990:

"Student affairs divisions are particularly challenged, given their ambiguous purpose (to support holistic student learning and development); the perception that they are support services, rather than core academic functions; and their primarily historically and traditionally framed organizational structures" (p. 22).

In the student affairs field, we have struggled with being included ourselves and we have also advocated for marginalized students to be included. Many offices in student affairs exist for this purpose of providing support and encouraging inclusion, such as women's centers, diversity and cultural offices, LGBT centers, and offices for students with disabilities.

It is here, in offices for students with disabilities, that the idea of inclusion specifically intersects with technical communication. Writing digital content using open web standards provides an opportunity for student affairs professionals and technical communicators to come together to serve students. Student affairs professionals should be advocates for accessible online content, and one way that we can do this is by understanding how to read the source code for a page. With an imaged labeled in the source code for the web page, students who rely on an auditory reading of a web page and could understand an image without being able to see it. An article in the December 12, 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education reports on this idea of inclusion: "Mr. Shandrow hit a wall when he got to Spanish 101. The obstacle: an online workbook that failed to correctly label images." Though this is a small example, it is a representative of the wider issues that students with disabilities face as they learn using technology. Using standards-based web design, technical communicators at universities can make web pages that are not only accessible for members of the community with disabilities, but better web design also helps the entire university population using universal design principles.

Think about the television remote as a universal design. When I was a kid, I was the remote control so my father did not have to get up to walk to the television. When it was time for M*A*S*H to air, his favorite program, I was the one who changed the channel for my dad. That remote helped those who could not walk to the television, as well as the multitudes of children that served as the channel changer. Even as recent as last night, rather than just changing the channel, we searched the entire house for the remote control which traveled down to the basement courtesy of my partner's brother. Apply that idea of universal design to creating web sites using standards recommended by A List Apart article, The Inclusion Principle, like clearly structured pages and headers, properly labeled images, and separating content structure from design ideas.

If student affairs professionals can understand the basics of digital literacy, even if we cannot write digitally, we can advocate for universal design principles that promote inclusion by helping communicate to the university community and those who interact digitally with our institutions.

What Kind of Writers Are Student Affairs Professionals?

How do student affairs professionals learn to write for the field, and could these professionals use technical communication knowledge, skills, and abilities to write better in the field? With so many students with various undergraduate degrees feeding into the student affairs graduate programs, how do graduate programs check writing skills upon admission? What skills do undergrads have when they enter a student affairs graduate program? As I begin my search for a dissertation topic, I have more questions than answers right now. In order to suss out answers to these questions, I need to formulate these questions and answers.

What level of writing skill do employers expect of student affairs professionals? How important is writing to the field of student affairs and what does research has to say about it?

Questions About Student Affairs Writing Education and Experience

-What undergraduate majors to student affairs graduates or professionals have upon entering graduate school or the field?

-What grade point averages do student affairs graduates or professionals have when entering graduate school or the field?

-More specifically, what grades in English courses and writing courses do new professionals or graduates earn?

-What writing training do graduate students in student affairs receive? Based on my program at WIU-- I wrote reflection pieces, case studies, research papers, debate materials, note cards for reading responses, group projects, counseling transcripts. There was probably more than that...

-What makes student affairs professionals competent writers?

Research Ideas About Student Affairs Professionals' Writing Practices

-Compare curricula for graduate programs in higher education programs in the United States.

-Compare academic and grade point data, if I can obtain it, from schools that admit students for graduate school. This would need to be done anonymously.

-Interview or survey students in graduate programs (new professionals, mid-level managers, senior administrators) to see if they can assess their writing skills.

-Present some sort of a field test for writing to graduates, new professionals, mid-level managers, senior administrators

-Survey groups of professionals at the different levels to see if their writing changes over time-- as a graduate what do you write? What are the mid-level managers writing? And the senior administrators? I'd need to think about the way I characterize the various levels in the field.

-Qualitative versus quantitative-- historical study of curricula in student affairs programs may be a way to look at changes in programs over time. Has there ever been a "writing for student affairs" course in any programs? That might be something good to take stock of by reviewing some program websites to see if I can find that type of a course. As a course, what would writing in student affairs look like? If it does not exist, should it?

Technical communication and student affairs thought: both have credibility issues in their fields, though tech comm has done a better job advocating for itself because it is the breadwinner of the English family. With its practical, measurable outcomes, tech comm does a better job justifying itself than does student affairs. Student affairs could borrow techniques from the technical writing field to strengthen the writing of graduate students and student affairs professionals at any level.

Student affairs folks need to be better about telling the student affairs story to students, senior administration, the faculty, and the community that surrounds the campus. Various ideas in technical communication could serve the field of student affairs. This idea of storytelling is important and people need to be able to understand what student affairs people do for students. Student Affairs professionals need to be able to communicate these messages using methods that are appropriate for the audience and are designed for maximum rhetorical effectiveness. Ideas of accountability are perforating student affairs conversations and the need to chart, graph, explain, demonstrate through financial documents and the pressure to perform and report on that performance is real.

What I Write in My Student Affairs Job

• Contract drafts
• Requests for proposals
• Financial documents
• Supervision documents, such as evaluations and written disciplinary letters
• Emails
• Monthly reports
• Policies and procedures
• Operational documentation the job positions
• Position descriptions and justifications
• Organizational charts
• Help desk tickets
• Website content
• Justification pieces to senior administration (most recently answering the question about why we use Federal Work Study to support campus auxiliary operations)

Forming A Hypothesis...or Just Spit-balling

Graduate students entering a program in student affairs come from various educational backgrounds and therefore have varied backgrounds in writing. This variation poses problems for the student affairs field if graduates and new professionals are not taught using writing standards in student affairs programs in the united states. Without this standardization for writing in the field, new professionals are unprepared for the various types of documents and arguments that can be made using the skills that technical communication education provides.

Side Note

This is a post I wrote using the Write or Die website, so it may ramble. If you have not seen the website, Write or Die challenges you to a free-write session where there are consequences for taking your fingers off of the keys. I set the "punishment" on the most forgiving level and just watched as a pink background flashed on my screen when I took too long to write. More aggressive options are available. One setting undoes typing that you have on the screen if you are not typing fast enough. I like the site because I focused on getting my ideas out there. I did not worry about writing coherently. Hence the apology at the start of this post. I have attempted to clean it up a bit, but I not spend too much time on the rewrite. Mostly, I'd like to keep my writing in as few places as possible, so I am adding the Write or Die speed-write, I mean free-write, session to these blog pages.

Student Affairs Professionals Should Add Technology Tools to Their Toolboxes

While reading Tom Johnson's blog post, "Tactics for Survival: A technical writer's field guide to overcoming the forces of petty project managers and broken IT environments," I thought about how student affairs professionals and technical communicators approach the idea of tools differently. When I was in graduate school working on my College Student Personnel degree, we talked of tools in the toolbox. These tools were mostly developmental and behavioral theories that we studied, and then we practiced these theories using our daily interactions with students in our assistantships, internships, and practicums. For technical communicators, the tools may be intellectual ideas as well, such as audience analysis research and rhetoric writings, but often what I see or read about are the actual tools that the technical communicator uses to communicate messages.

Student affairs folks could benefit from the discussion about tools in the practical sense that technical communicators talk about it. Programs, software, hardware, deceives...these are all tools that tech comm professionals use in their everyday work to produce, deliver, and track information. Because our students are digitally savvy, student affairs professionals should work to educate themselves and to keep up with these practical tools. Knowing and using practical communication tools makes communication with students more meaningful.

Authors Klages and Clark point out, in their article 2009 article "New Worlds of Errors and
Expectations: Basic Writers and Digital Assumptions," that students in college today don't know a day without technological conveniences that are a part of life from the minute that their cell phone wakes them up in the morning. While students know this technology and integrate it seamlessly into their lives, they may still not know the basics of writing, arguing, and critical thinking. Young student affairs professionals that attend graduate school right out of their undergraduate studies will certainly have similar technology experiences as the undergraduate students; however, the theoretical tools in their tool boxes come from learning and not from any experience other than the experience gained from the two years of school.

With a few years of experience beyond graduate school, student affairs professionals begin to develop the body of knowledge that informs their actions. Without a curiosity for the technology tools that are constantly emerging, the student affairs professional can lose ground with technology quickly. The student affairs professional needs to keep informed about the tools that are available to them so that they can easily communicate with students. The tools for communication cannot be a barrier to the interactions that we must have for students.

The good news for professionals with some experience behind them is that it is easy to join and keep up with the conversation in and around technology. Students and new professionals are willing and excited to share when they know about technologies. Mid-level and senior professionals should be treating this learning as an extension of their professional development. Communicating using technology is an important tool for the studnet affairs professional's toolbox.

What Technical Communicators Teach Student Affairs Professionals about Collaborative Authorship

Collaborative authorship may be a place where the fields of Technical Communication and Student Affairs meet. And in this meeting, each may learn from one another. Student affairs professionals and technical communicators may have some valuable lessons to teach each other about the value of collaboration and authorship, separately, and collaborative authorship.

Student Affairs: Collaboration for Development is Fundamental
The goal for the student affairs professional is to help develop students into a better students, into leaders, and eventually, into contributing citizens of the university. Using developmental theories, student affairs professionals work together collaboratively to assist students in every way imaginable. Teams of support staff in colleges and universities use various theories to collaborate with fellow professionals, faculty, and most importantly, the students themselves.

Viewing students through the various theoretical lenses such as cognitive development, identity development, and career inventories, student affairs professionals work together with the end goal of helping students develop.

Technical Communication: Authorship for Audience is Fundamental
The technical communications professional is keenly aware of audience in authoring materials for users. Collaboration for the technical communicator means working as a liaison between developers of content and users of content. Collaboration often takes the form of technical communicators producing several iterations of documents for their audience to approve. Using various technical tools, software and hardware, a technical communicator works collaboratively with the user to deliver understandable, useful content.

Student Affairs and Technical Communication: Learning Fundamentals from Each Other
In student affairs realms, there is a real sense of working together to benefit the community of students. There is a greater good that drives a student affairs person in their jobs, and that greater good is developing students collaboratively. Technical communicators are driven as well-- driven to communicate the best message to the audience in they way that the audience will best hear it. Though this is the case, technical communicators don't work often in collaborative teams due to the often times freelance nature of positions. Student affairs personnel have the benefit of being located on the same campus together in the community. Technical communicators could learn from student affairs professionals by understanding that the community interaction is critical and that face to face interactions--social interactions, even-- are essential. Where the student affairs professionals fall short is with authorship. The documentation that comes from the field is too sparse and not iterative enough. Student affairs people can take a lesson from technical communicators: ask students for input repeatedly and make documents that reflect the feedback.

Collaborative Authorship: Fundamentals for Student Affairs Professionals
Student affairs personnel can infuse collaborative authorship into several areas of their jobs. For those who supervise student employees, collaborating on the writing of the policies and procedures on a wiki can be a way for professional staff to elicit constant feedback from students. A wiki document is a way to build information and trust in the documentation process because of the collaborative nature of the writing. Certain permissions can and should be set, but there could be levels that are "unlocked" as students achieve greater responsibility in the organization.

A collaborative wiki could be used for student organization volunteers as well. Trainings would benefit by collaborative authorship, as well. Committees of students and professionals should be working together to author training documents and sessions.

Collaborative authorship works for student affairs professionals working up the administrative chain of the university. By banding together to tell the story, various departments can and should author documentation that shows the worth of student affairs to students and to the university. There is not enough being written by professionals in student affairs.

Lists

Key Word: Lists

My first idea for today's key words post was to write about an ethical dilemma I faced this week. The key words were obvious: "Ethical dilemma" would serve as the title and the central key words for the post. The story about this ethical dilemma is long; words and phrases began crowding my thoughts immediately as I thought about how to write this post. My emotions about this situation mixed with my thoughts and started to jumble those words and phrases in my head. My rational side took over: Maybe another word would be a better springboard for reflection and discussion, I thought. Soon, several ideas for posts were competing for attention and I began organizing my thoughts into a neat little mental list.

Lists, lists, lists. If it is not on a list, chances are it won't get done. And even if it is on a list, it still might not get done. Lists are an easy, fast way to get my thoughts out. I can organize my thoughts...hold myself accountable. Soon, several ideas were competing for attention.

In an effort to centralize ideas for posts as well as finding a repository to dump my thoughts, here is a list of what I think could be future posts:

• Ethical dilemma
• User-centered design and activity theory
• Zone
• Goal jeans
• Anxiety

Now to get back to my homework list...chances are it will all get done. Then again, it might not.

Test

Key Word: Test

Test is the first Key Word I will build a blog post around. I am new to the blogosphere and am checking out this blogging experience before I return to my homework. Test is the key word for this post for two purposes. The first is the reason I just mentioned: I am testing this system by posting because this is my first blog post, and secondly because this idea of being more technically capable has been a test- a test of my will, a test of my intelligence, and a test of my self-confidence.

At near forty years old, I have returned to school in pursuit of my PhD in Technical Communication at IIT. Having been out of the technical conversation for several years, I returned to the classroom to pursue my degree, mostly to keep my mind occupied. This tests my will. While at times I feel like have the willpower to succeed, there are days when I question the sanity of my decision. What makes it easier for me than most people, I imagine, is that I do not have kids. Also, my partner travels for work so I have uninterrupted stretches of time to concentrate on my studies.

The program also tests my intelligence. New subject matter, new technology, and new ways of learning has me wrapping my brain around what it means to be a technical communicator. I am back in the educational world of analysis and synthesis of information. I am making connections as I progress through this degree program and engage myself in the learning environment, both the physical and mental learning environments, and the material is at times very challenging.

Lastly, my self-confidence is tested often being my age in the classroom. Having some life experiences behind me, I have a certain level of self-assurance that I have developed. My self-confidence is challenged at times by the imbalance of not knowing how to write code for a website. At the same time, my experience provides me with the maturity to understand that the upset to my confidence is temporary as I use my will and intelligence to push through it.