/home/helpdesk/bin is called helpdesk trial software collection. It has some software that are not supported by Rice IT department such as mutt, R and rxvt. If you are interested in certain software that is not supported by Rice IT, you can send an email to me and I might be able to install it under helpdesk.
/home/helpdesk/newbin is another interesting directory that you might want to put in the first place of your $PATH. It has the newest version of some applications that has been installed on stat network. For example, you can use /home/helpdesk/newbin/pine instead of /use/local/bin/pine. The advantages (and disadvantage) of the previous one are that it has the newest features and there is no pre-set parameters so you can set up pine in the way you want.