The college setting has unique challenges for young adults, including reliance on college dining halls for food choices. Dietary patterns within emerging adulthood and the factors that influence them within college dining halls are understudied. Manuscript #1 is a qualitative study using focus group discussions that determined five factors that influence food choice in college dining halls in first year college students: environment, convenience, time, food preferences and familiarity, and health. Results found that students enjoyed eating healthfully, were confident in their ability to eat healthy and find healthy food options in the dining halls. Students designing their ideal dining hall wanted the healthy choice to be the convenient choice and wanted to “work for” desserts and other “unhealthy” food items. Manuscript #2 is a survey of dining hall students’ perceptions of their dining hall environment with pictures of plate data showing their food choice in the dining hall. Students who ranked themselves as more stressed were less confident in their ability to find a healthy food choice and less likely to rank their plates as healthy. Students confident in their ability to find a healthy choice in the dining hall had more beans, peas, and sweet potatoes on their plates and fewer potato-based vegetables. Students with higher perceived healthiness in their plate had greater portions of fruits and vegetables on their plate. Students with larger portions of potato-based vegetables on their plates ranked their plates as unhealthier. Students in the dining hall ranked as the “healthiest” of the 5 dining halls were significantly less confident in their ability to make healthy food choices and rated the healthiness of the food on their plate significantly lower than students in the dining hall ranked as the most conducive of social engagement and had significantly less vegetables on their plate. Our data adds to the limited research on factors influencing food choice in college dining halls and is the first to identify students’ ideal dining hall designs and how dining hall environment influences food choice.