Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: In the fall semester of 2022, I had experienced a sexual assault at Queen's University. Evidently, this was a difficult time and lead to intense feelings of depression, anxiety and paranoia. This lead to a lot of difficulty concentrating and doing any schoolwork which took a toll on my academic progress. I had reached out to Barb Lotan who was great help, and was directed to a counsellor at KGH specialized in sexual assault cases. After my referral, I was having therapy sessions with said counsellor biweekly for around 9 months. As our session progressed, I had taken on strategies to manage my feelings and learn how to move on after the incident. After a while I decided I wanted to try navigating on my own and was no longer attending therapy for the assault.

At first, I seemed to be doing good and was catching up academically and had started to feel overall better. After some time, specially during my forth year in the winter semester, I had started to feel symptoms of depression and anxiety coming on. As the semester progressed, the feelings started getting worse and I felt completely isolated from my housemates, my friends and my academics. I found getting motivated to do anything quite hard and I was falling behind in school. After a while I had the courage to go to student counselling to get a new therapist and try to grow from this situation. However, both my therapist and I decided it be better I go home for the remaining few weeks of my last winter semester. Being back at home with my family was a great help and I continued those sessions online.

Unfortunately there were some exams I was unable to complete and there was a long process for deferred exams as I was able to write some exams but not others. These decisions also spilled into the the beginning weeks of may after the deadline to add classes to the summer semester.