aamcnamara

In which Harvard University utterly fails to do anything like feed me or provide a way for me to feed myself.

( Extensive details about fail )
I remain very, very glad that I had somewhere else to go.


tl;dr:
1. Harvard very obviously does not train their staff members working in event planning to deal with allergies. The REU event coordinator/food planner has been working at Harvard for some time, in a couple of different areas, and does not seem to have received training in this area.
2. They must not have a clear way for programs on campus to get information about what the options available to students with allergies are. I understand if not every program on campus can be trained to deal with every eventuality--but if you are not going to train them on at least the likely ones, you ought to have some system set up so that they know who to talk to.
2a. I am left to speculate on whether they receive disability-accommodations training at all.
2b. I am left to wonder why they did not look into any of this before they told me I could have a kitchen, or before I arrived.
3. The Harvard dining services told me repeatedly that they were certain they could feed me… until I mentioned the possibility of me having asthma from inhaled allergens in the kitchen. They then told me, under cover of an excuse, that they were "not...able to accommodate [my] request" for a meal plan.
3a. This sounds extremely like "you would be too much of a liability and we don't want the bad publicity".
4. All of this took approximately a month, during which--if I hadn't had somewhere else to go--I would have been working with a dorm-sized fridge, a microwave, and a tiny, dirty kitchen which was open to a nebulous group of people to which I did not belong and with whom I had no contact. And nothing else.

Speaking of bad publicity for Harvard, how about signal-boosting/linking this? If nothing else, I'd like other people with allergies/asthma who are looking at colleges or undergraduate research programs to know what they might be getting into. Yes, maybe I was too trusting at first; yes, maybe I should have been more clear in my requests, or asked more questions... but that does not excuse what happened. Not at all.