[Nat0]

I do not know much about RISD, but this seems to be a common problem at most art schools/departments.

I had to teach myself everything about UI design while I was working on my degree in visual communications. None of my professors thought it was different enough than print design to warrant additional attention, or they were just afraid to say that they didn't know.

[_delirium]

At the previous school I was at, trying to find some sort of synergy between the CS department's game-design program, and anything in the art department, also ran into some of those problems, more from faculty/department disinterest than student disinterest. There were actually quite a few students who were 3dsMax or Illustrator wizards, learned on their own time, but the art departments didn't see that sort of thing as in their scope at all.

Although to be fair CS departments sometimes get those complaints as well. We want to teach people fundamentals of computer science, but what a lot of other departments really wish we'd teach is practical programming/script-slinging, often in languages that none of our courses focus on (Fortran, Matlab, Perl).