Transfer Student Courses and Credits

Person painting at a desk in a Memorial Hall studio.

See below for info about course registration and transferring eligible college credits, specifically for transfer students arriving at RISD this year. We’ll also point you to people who can assist you in the process.

Summer Experimental and Foundation Studies (EFS)

Approximately half of all transfer students are required to attend the Summer EFS program, a six-week immersion in RISD’s approach to studio learning.

The program is taught by EFS faculty and offers the same three studios as in the first-year EFS curriculum: Drawing, Design and Spatial Dynamics. Each studio meets for 10 hours per week, over the course of 1.5 days. This totals to 60 hours per course.

By successfully completing the program, you earn nine of your 18 required EFS credits. The curriculum is designed to strengthen your confidence as a maker and to reinforce your critical thinking capabilities—an excellent point of entry into studio life at RISD.

Course registration

At RISD we use Workday as our hub for course information and scheduling, academic advising and registration. This is also where to find a record of your transfer credits and required courses.

We’ll email you detailed instructions about registering for courses, so watch your RISD inbox. For general questions about course registration, please contact your academic department. (For a list of academic departments, go to risd.edu.)

Transferring credits

We award transfer credit for those earned at a regionally accredited, residential, nonprofit college or university. Students must receive a grade of “C” or better in order to transfer earned course credits.

For questions about transferring liberal arts credits, please contact Liberal Arts division’s operations and administration coordinator, Gail Hughes.

For questions about applying transfer credits to your EFS requirements, please contact the program’s senior division coordinator, Karen Zucconi.