Crafting Difference-Making Futures

Rochester Institute of Technology’s College of Art and Design is a place where students’ unusual and imaginative ideas evolve and become reality. Our stimulating environment and readily available collaborative opportunities ensure it. 

We’re a playground for exploration: a place where ambitious concepts are constantly growing and on the verge of making an impact on the world. Here, our students are exposed to industry-level equipment and technology, which aids their propensity to advance industries while still at RIT. 

Through co-ops and experiential learning, industry partnerships, and an abundance of multidisciplinary courses and projects, our students have many outlets for real-world application of theories, principles, and ideas.

They screen their films and animations in local festivals —a precursor to earning countless screen credits on major motion pictures and Academy Awards as alumni. They write research papers about the engineering side of film that are published in major journals and recognized with awards. 

They team up with organizations and each other to solve everyday issues by designing life-changing products. They showcase their innovative, difference-making work to hundreds of thousands at NYCxDESIGN, New York City’s global celebration of design. They win honors in the Adobe Design Achievement Awards for their socially-conscious and thoughtful experience designs.
 
They use their glassblowing abilities to work with engineering students in the creation of healthcare improvements. They exhibit their artwork in the College of Art and Design’s galleries and beyond. 

They are invited to prestigious photography workshops and execute professional-level shoots before graduating and moving on to photographing high-profile celebrities and world leaders and capturing Pulitzer Prizes. They win national advertising awards for a magazine produced in an interdisciplinary course mixing photography and design. 

Upon graduation, our students are equipped with the type of sophisticated skill set that employers seek. They are conversant with the cutting-edge technology and methods of today, and they use it to make a better tomorrow.

Here, we make sure you’re appropriately trained to hit the ground running as a professional, with no learning curve. Just ask some of our alumni who work for companies like Adobe, Disney, Dolby, DreamWorks, Google, Marvel Comics, NASA, Nike, Science magazine, the Smithsonian Institution, and Tiffany & Co., where an alumna helped make the Super Bowl trophy as a silversmith. To that end, for any popular product, film, video game, app, or ad campaign, there is a good chance a former College of Art and Design student had their hands in the creative process.  

Because here, students cross boundaries to make exceptional happen. They combine top-notch resources with independent thinking to shake up industry. Here, a world of opportunity awaits.