How to Navigate the College Search with Allergies
When you are researching potential colleges and universities for your School List, don’t forget to add the criteria specific to your personal situation. Maybe you can’t survive without access to spicy Indian food or a bowling alley or a baby grand piano for practicing scales, or maybe you are one of the more than 50 million allergy sufferers in the US.
While college search databases can help you start a list of potential schools, they work with limited data points, such as a school’s size, setting, cost of attendance, and academic majors. It’s up to you to determine what matters to you beyond the general statistics and to do the research.
When you live at home, your allergens are known quantities. You know which foods to avoid and what times of year to keep the windows closed to keep the pollens out. But colleges are an unknown quantity. Will there be foods I can eat? Will my nose be so stuffy and my head so wooly I won’t be able to concentrate on classes for two months each year?
Allergy sufferers know it’s not possible to completely avoid their triggers, but it sure helps to know what situation you’re getting into for the next four years before you send your first tuition check.
Seasonal
When I moved from the northeast to California for graduate school, my father was convinced I would never leave Paradise, as he refers to Santa Barbara. It turns out, though, that new allergies found me there (and I really missed the snow!). About ten years later, I moved to central Illinois for a job, and each Spring I experienced my worst seasonal allergies ever, going on medication for the first time just to get through the day.
Although it’s obvious now, I’d never considered how moving to new regions of the country would affect my allergies. Instead, I had focused on the opportunities before me.
If you’re planning to go to a college within driving distance of home, you may already know the potential seasonal allergens, but it never hurts to do some research.
The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America puts out an annual report listing the “asthma capitals” and the “allergy capitals” of the US.
www.pollen.com provides maps of the US with seasonal allergy forecasts—a great planning tool for campus visits (and vacations!). Check the colleges on your School List every so often to see what’s going on seasonally.
Alternatively, sign up for email alerts from the National Allergy Bureau (NAB), which tracks pollen and mold levels from about 78 stations throughout the US.
Food
This past summer, I visited Connecticut College with my daughter and her severely nut-allergic best friend, and we ate lunch at the main dining hall. Even though the options and staff were reduced for the summer, one of the dining administrators came out to talk to us about Conn’s set-up, from their “Delicious Without” station (an area that stocks foods that do not contain any of the nine major food allergens) to QR codes next to each dish in the buffet and online menus of the daily offerings with nutrition information. At Conn, and many other colleges and universities, students are encouraged to meet with the dining services’s dietician even before they arrive on campus to learn about all the options.
The Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE) association’s website is a treasure trove of information for the high school student researching potential schools. They have articles and reports about navigating food allergies at college; a Teen Corner, with content written for teens by teens; and informative webinars, such as “Navigating College and the College [application] process with Food Allergies.”
As a fellow allergy sufferer, I wish you luck in your search!
