Use whatever you have at your disposal is the right answer.
If you have a shop at school, learn what each tool does and when you’d need to use it. Most school ID programs should have some type of prototyping capabilities unless it’s a very young program or small school that doesn’t have the funding.
When I was in school we had everything from laser cutters that could slice you sheet material, a full wood/metal shop that you could fab larger designs like furniture, a plastic shop for carving foam/thermoforming plastic, and eventually they got the 3D printer working shortly after graduation. Even had a few concrete workshops in there for good measure (I made a great set of pencil holders…never fell over).
Part of design school is learning how materials behave, what your design intent is, and what the best method and material of building that item will be. And the reason you need to learn that skill is because once you graduate you’re going to need to be able to say “hey, we could make this out of X material using Y process” if you aren’t good at that, you’ll be one of the dunce kids in the back saying “let’s make it out of CNC aluminum and Carbon fiber even though it needs to cost $10”