April Fools: boB Spotted Using iGrad to Manage the College’s Finances
boB looking carefully through his iGrad report
By Benjamin Pontz, Editor-in-Chief
When a team focused on student retention rolled out a new financial literacy platform called iGrad last month, they thought it would be useful for students in need of a loan, an interest rate calculator, or help finding scholarships. As part of the Charting Your Course (CYC) extended orientation program, first-year students were asked to create a profile and take a Financial Wellness Checkup.
“When you sign up for iGrad, you unlock cool mini-courses to improve the money skills that are most important to you,” a video on the iGrad home page says. “And when you answer just a few quick questions, iGrad starts recommending personal finance resources that are relevant to you.”
But a mysterious user with the screen name “boB” — apparently unaware that his name is a palindrome such that reversing it does not really conceal his identity — has popped up in the system and claims to have more than $331 million in assets. The twist, though, is that he completed a module titled “How to Catch Up When You’re Behind.” According to the interactive interface, he entered as the friends that he trails as “M&F” and “nosnikciD.”
An investigation by The Gettysburgian has uncovered that the assets he said that the mysterious “M&F” and “nosnikciD” have correlate almost exactly to the real-world endowments of F&M and Dickinson. Shocking!
In addition to catching up to his peers, the user “boB” was observed consulting a video titled “How to Divest from Assets That Are Just Too Expensive.” Scrawled on a legal pad was the word “FRIP,” which a Gettysburgian source believes stands for “Faculty Retirement Incentive Program.”
A college spokesperson vigorously denied this accusation and said that “FRIP” could stand for any number of things such as:
- Feeling Really Insecure Personally
- Finances Regularly Incite Panic
- Freedom Really Is Pizza
- F****** Reporters Identifying Problems!
But The Gettysburgian‘s intuition that senior faculty are being given some financial incentive to leave was corroborated when the Mercedes Benz of Gettysburg dealership was reclassified as a “life-sustaining business” allowed to remain open during the quarantine after 17 members of the senior faculty staged a sit-in in the parking lot and blocked traffic in both directions as they sat at six-foot intervals.
“We don’t have anything else to do now that we teach online,” said one, insisting on anonymity. “I only came to campus two days a week before this whole fracas. Now, I don’t have to at all! What’s Moodle?”
Later, boB was seen nervously playing with one of iGrad’s financial calculators and taking repeated shots of imported tea after realizing that the college’s decision to refund room and board might cost up to $8 million.
Fortunately for “boB,” iGrad offers live chatting with financial experts. As of press time, he was 1,832nd in the queue awaiting assistance for his question: “What in Ike’s name are we going to do?”
