RISD Life

As an older student, and having been on my own since 17, I decided to get an apartment off campus. It was a nice apartment in what seemed like a safe enough neighborhood until I found out where I was living…Federal Hill, home of the New England mafia. As it turned out, that neighborhood was in fact “foot for foot” the safest neighborhood in America…if you were liked…which I was.

Don’t worry, we’re going to get to the “professional development” part of this section soon enough. Before you can become a professional you need more than just book smarts. For years I had been honing my street level skills and was respected as a professional in that theater. As my design courses kicked in I was having a lot of internal conflict between being the tough guy and the budding artiste. There was a point during the Freshman Foundation when, thanks to some advice from one of my professors, a light bulb went off and I started using my God given talents to pull off some really good grades…something that had escaped me in high school. But that first year was like being at a trade school, with hands-on classes that involved everything from drawing to model making to glass blowing, you name it…it was where I needed to be.

The second year which was essentially the first immersive year in Industrial Design was awesome. My infomercial brain was always looking for an opportunity to tackle the next assignment and give it a name and a life on the page or in a 3 dimensional form by way of a handmade or machined model. I was on a high, and enjoying the passion for designing and being innocent and away from the streets I was all too familiar with in my former life.