You're not going to have ping issues with games. They're not "stingy" about bittorrent or p2p, but if they get contacted you will get contacted. It's happened to me twice already and another friend at least once. Best not to use Pirate Bay and to stick with passworded/user sites. Peer Guardian will work but in my experience it's more of hassel than a help.
Students will definitely help you out, I find the atmosphere to be very encouraging to collaborative work and no one in my classes wouldn't take hte time to meet up with you and work with you if you're having trouble. People aren't out to screw you, even the few who are overly grade conscious are not so in the sense that they will want you to do worst to boost their grade.
I haven't qualified for workstudy yet, so I can't speak to much on it but check this page out:
http://financialaid.brown.edu/JobX_F...spx?t=qs&qs=21
There are plenty of jobs on campus.
Events are mostly cheap to free on campus, only things like the Spring Weekend concerts hit double digit costs that I know of. Providence is pretty averagely priced as far as I can tell but I am from NY so what I tolerate is different than others.