A word of welcome to the class of 2012 - from the other end of the tuition bill - you just pimped yourselves out to one of the best art schools in the country (what what), so go ahead- wrap your arms around ya body, somebody, and give a little hug. The governing forces at RISD thought it would be helpful to have a student perspective on here so here I am, blogging to give you the benefit of my (iota more) experience here. My name’s You You (really, yeah), BFA ID 2011 (this major means I don’t like to sleep and like plastic, alot.) and I’m here to give you the down low–

here goes:

eat:
@ school: the Met (cafe-met-eria), Jolly Roger (sammiches), the Break, the Watermark Cafe, the Portfolio (classy-er)

not school: Thayer ($ are ok), downtown (more expensive), Providence Place Mall (a combo of fastfood and restaurants

play:
regular stuff includes music venues (AS220, Lupos), mall, Thayer St, Wickedon St, skating rink, zoo, some stuff to check out downtown are the Big Nazo Labs (huge puppets) and the boutiques (they carry stuff made by RISD alum)

sleep:
you wont depends on what section you get put into (consequently what professors you get), your work habits (you have some?), but generally there’s a lack of it freshman year.

want more detail? some helpful links to frequent:

RISD Intranet: home to the Classifieds, a sweet little blackmarket of goods and services and the Mugbook (stalk your peers!) an online yearbook [note: the Mugbook is password protected, so only people with a risd.edu email address can access it — something to look forward to when you’re assigned your RISD email!]

Daily Jolt: A student-run website, really helpful for everything (sophisticated version of this post). The name is, coincidentally (it’s only a branch of the national Jolt website which serves a network of different colleges) weather related- Rhode Island is the “Ocean State” and apparently all the surrounding water makes it susceptible to weather phenomena (wikipedia), you may also have heard of Lightning Bolt, a noise band started at RISD which used to play at Fort Thunder (now defunct, destroyed actually).

Oh, it’s cold up here so bring a sweater, or five. And hilly, so maybe a sherpa too.

Good luck!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 1:54 pm and is filed under student. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.