Your Guide to the WFR Course

Well, for those twenty-five or so of us who are doing it, WFR is in two months. But how many of us are really prepared? Or is it how do we prepare that we should actually be asking? Or why? Or what WFR is?

Well, for those of you who have questions IIT is here to help as we ourselves try to find the answers.

WFR stands for the Wilderness First Responder Certification Course and is actually a top-secret program intended to train, you, the budding Student Rocker, in clandestine operations and remote situations to achieve the goals of the Office of Student Life, specifically in fighting rivals such as TAC or Christendom.

At least that’s what our spy told us it means. Others, however, including IIT staff, still cling strongly to the rumor that WFR is a medical course as the school officially says, but is concentrated rather in the Timmy treatment so famously developed by Professor Cyril Patton.

Well, I guess we’ll possibly find out more if we look at the book they gave us. Of course it probably has nothing to the WFR course, but John M., when he did this same course last year, claimed to have received a similiarly large book. Perhaps…

At least the one I got looks like this. It’s titled Wildcare but since that’s the farthest I’ve read, I guess this question will have to wait. For the moment IIT is checking to see if everyone actually got this same book amid reports that some persons preparing to do WFR instead may have received this book instead.

Well, we’ll ask then? Which one did you get from the school? Was it that one or this one?

And if you didn’t get either book yet, whatever they are actually about or entitled, there’s no cause for concern. John read the book in three days and passed the course (seems this means there’s a test involved…) so we bet y’all can do well too if the book is still in Wyoming at the moment.

Now, on the question of how to study…

Since IIT staff don’t know for sure what the course is even about, and which book is to be used, we find the next problem, how to study, a little harder than average to answer. How does one study for something they haven’t read, know nothing about, and don’t even know what it is.

Whenever we do find out what we should study or how to study, however, the next logical question is how long one should study, and for this, we actually do have an objective answer, from Dr. Grove. But there is a slight problem, he gave two answers, so you might have to reason which category you’re in first.

Its either “Five hours plus ten minutes with a comb” or “five and a half plus an ice cream” as Dr. Grove so elegantly put it last semester. At the moment, our researchers are eagerly transliterating and pulling his words to pieces in a way that still allows the text to retain its living nature, mind you, but to discern whether we can figure, understand, comprehend, stretch, sophist, or pretend these hour estimates to be applicable to the action of “quote studying”.

After all, “it’s my new favorite way to ‘not’ study” a Freshman Rocker said last fall, and would make whatever WFR is about go by like a piece of cake.

And bringing up the “going by” implies change. Because time is the most common way of measuring change (maybe Andrew Russell is another, maybe…) this brings up yet another important point, the WFR course’s timing. I think it’s August 12th, but you see even time can be equivocal. What if, for example, there is no change, starting now? Then there would be nothing for time to measure, and IIT Scientist, Aretari believes, therefore no time at all.

If this nearly unthinkable situation doesn’t happen, the more likely fate of there being change and thus time to measure it, priduces another problem. Is it August 12th on Mars or August 12th on Earth? August 12th in the Gregorian calendar or August 12th in the Julian Calendar (if there is such a thing?)? Is it August 12th that the “course” itself begins? Or is it August 12th that the school provides a shuttle to Denver whereby the actual course doesn’t start until the next day?

Come to think of it? What about getting there, really? Is the school going to provide the shuttle? Do we have to walk to Lander ourselves? (In that case, of course, it might be advisable to start going back starting about now for some of us…especially Michel and Brendan) Are we expected to show up exactly on time, that is according to the precise amount of change so measured artificially to be a said time of requirement?

What about housing? Will the new apartments be open yet? The dorms, will they have survived the ravages of rumored raids of TACers and NOLSeys?

Again, you see there are quite a lot of questions and little hope of any of them ever being answered as Dr. Grove again said, “Ohh, we don’t answer questions here, dear”. Not only does this apparently mean that none of our questions will be answered, but why? His statement itself raises questions all the more.

Even if by chance (a per accidens interaction of separate natures to an end not in either of them per se) another professor may actually answer questions, few are willing to actually ask all of these important questions just raised here. For one, Dr. Lasnoski once said, “Remember there are no dumb questions, just dumb people.” And even students seem to have jumped on the bandwagon of “preventing questions” as both Omnisciens and a student from the South performed mind-blowing feats of question prevention with their intellectual prowess.

So should we even try? Should we follow Blaise’s advice, and just give up?

Well, perhaps another piece of his wisdom is more appropriate as we face WFR, which we at IIT apologize for having become even more confused about over the course of writing this article.

He expects us to be smart. He expects too much of us.
Blaise

Here Blaise summarizes the Freshman Experience in two short sentences. And applying his wisdom to whatever WFR actually is, we’ll know that it can’t be much more than the “too much of us” expected that we already went through.

So as long as we don’t have to go through the rumored “second death” of which Blaise is also a firm “Yikes” believer or wind up drinking whiskey when Magister told us to drink his coffee, we’ll be alright.

Mediocriter, maybe, but we’ll see. John survived of course, and IIT is pretty sure some of the rising Juniors did this course last year, so there’s probably hope then or as Louisa said “Faith that there is Hope”

So here’s our real suggestions for how to ace the actual course after IIT had some coffee, a few hours of sleep, and a jolt of “Back in Black”:

Study about something – maybe from the Wildcare book (come to think of it, maybe WFR is about first aid or something like that. At least that hasn’t been eliminated yet as a possibility.
Buy our t-shirt
Sleep a little
Listen to metal or proto-metal. We suggest this song.