Every first-year at the Rhode Island School of Design enrolls in the Experimental and Foundation Studies program. But while students praise the experimental nature of the courses, many voiced concerns about the intensity of the program.
The curriculum consists of three studio classes — “Drawing,” “Design” and “Spatial Dynamics” — which is supported by additional liberal arts coursework.
The program places first-years into groups of approximately 20 students at the beginning of the fall semester. Throughout their first semester, that same group of students works with three different professors, each covering one studio class. Groups are then reorganized in the spring semester.
Professors do not follow a unified curriculum for the studio classes, meaning that every student who goes through the program gets a vastly different experience. But for Brown-RISD Dual Degree student Celine Huang ’27, “that’s the beauty of it.”
“In an ideal situation, a student leaves EFS with six completely different points of view on art and design,” Dean of EFS Clement Valla told The Herald. “They then take that constellation and figure out for themselves how to apply all of these different approaches.”
But some students said this means the EFS experience is incredibly professor-dependent. “It’s like a lottery” said Brown-RISD Dual Degree student Maximos Spatharakis ’29. “A lot of people had a group of really tough or really good professors, so it really was the luck of the draw.”
RISD sophomore Kaz Bradley said that EFS should establish more uniformity to ensure everyone gains the same skills. “If EFS is something that everyone has to do, it should have some level of standard curriculum so that everyone comes out on a level playing field,” they said.
Some students also struggled with the EFS’s long class-lengths. Each studio class meets once per week for seven-and-a-half hours, often starting at 8 a.m. First-year students have studio classes three times a week.
“You go to the studio at 8 or 8:30 a.m. and then come back at like 4:30 or 5 p.m.,” Huang said, joking that students “don’t see the sun for three out of five days out of the week.”
On the days Huang did not have her studio classes at RISD and would come to Brown for class, she often thought, “Wow, there are people, like there’s sun!”
Despite long class-lengths, Huang said that EFS was “a good way for students to get into the art school environment and get exposure to different mediums.”
Studios are intended to be intense experiences, where a lot of work gets done within allotted class time, Valla said.
Students are also expected to put in several hours of outside work for their classes. “It’s part of the RISD experience,” Huang said. Among a majority of RISD students, there is a mentality that you have to “tough it out,” but she also worries that this idea can be “taken a little too far.”
Ellery Snyderman, a RISD sophomore, said “there’s so many assignments that you are not going to get anything out of,” and that most professors want to “see a very specific set of (students’) skills.”
Other students criticized the school’s approach to the workload. “There needs to be a better support network for students,” Bradley said, especially for “students who have no experience with a school that’s this intense.”
First-years must declare their major during the spring semester, making second-semester EFS courses frustrating for some students. Spatharakis shared that having to continue with the EFS program after declaring a major felt like “a regression, instead of evolving.”
Despite these criticisms, many students felt like the program helped them grow as artists and students. Snyderman said that the high workload helped promote “a really good work ethic,” adding that this drive helps push students as they advance through RISD.
Spatharakis felt that EFS forced him to gain confidence in expressing his ideas, and to be more “bold,” adding that the program helped push him out of his comfort zone. Spatharakis, who is from Greece, said that his high school was not as experimental, whereas RISD fuses the “European old fashioned rigidity of foundation year” and the “American experimental art school vibe.”
Another goal of the EFS program is to develop what Valla calls a “critique culture.” During RISD studio classes, the instructor and other students give feedback on submitted work, aiming to help students develop and grow as artists. The critique process is “a very peculiar yet very powerful modality” for collaborative analysis, Valla said. “That’s the core of RISD.”.
A major part of the program for many students is the community built within the classes. Spatharakis shared there was a feeling of “solidarity” among students with tough professors, saying that students were able to relate and support each other.
Bradley said the community “is really the best thing you get out of EFS,” adding that even if “the program is nonsense and is overly difficult, you come out having this bond with your class.”
