Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean of Arts and Science,

My name is Tyler Mathews, and I am an Arts and Science student at Queens University. I am currently majoring in Drama and minoring in English, with an eventual goal of being accepted to graduate school and pursuing higher academics. I am appealing to drop the course ENG257 from my transcript and to change the credit for the course DRAM242.

This year I finally sought help for what I knew was mental illness. I did not know what specifically was wrong, but it was clear that something bad was happening inside my head. I felt low, exhausted, defeated, on-edge. I would go days without sleeping or eating or I would spend days eating everything in sight and sleeping fifteen to twenty hours. My attendance, which has always been acceptable, fell far below academic standards and my work ethic was almost nonexistent. School, which has always been something that comes naturally to me, felt toxic. My memory faded, my attention waned completely, and my interest in anything that I had felt passionate about before dissipated. After some prodding by my girlfriend I went to Queens Wellness and met with a counselor, named Deb, who has sent documentation to support this appeal. I also met with a psychiatrist, Dr. Debra Hamer, who will also be sending documentation supporting this appeal. Dr. Hamer diagnosed me with dissociate identity disorder, alongside other symptoms including general and social anxiety and clinical depression. DID is not common, so to explain, I felt most of the time like I was watching myself live my life, and had no control over what I was doing or saying or thinking or feeling. I would have periods where I would blackout and wake up in strange and foreign places, with no memory or understanding of how I got there or what had transpired. I would have bouts where I feel like another person. I would feel like the world around me was not real, like it was happening in a kind of dream-scape. These feelings and things seriously affected my school work, specifically DRAM242 and ENG257.

The reason I am appealing the marks for these two courses specifically is because, due to the struggles outlined in the previous paragraph, these two were the ones that suffered over the year. They suffered because I looked at my workload and divided up what needed to be done by completing assignments for my major first and my minor second. It was the only way I could get anything done. Every assignment and quiz for both ENG257 and DRAM242 were completed last because neither course were prerequisites or essential towards completing my degree, and it was all I could do this year to even get out of bed in the morning. I did as much as I was humanly able to do each day, and unfortunately, these two classes bore the weight of everything that happened this year. My attendance for both classes was abysmal, my projects far below what I consider normal standards for me, my ability to reintegrate and intake knowledge nonexistent. ENG257 I outright failed because I was incapable of handling the course along with all that was going on. I did not attend the exam, and alerted the teacher, ph.D candidate Allison Goff, to how I was feeling and the effects these feelings had on the course. She has indicated that she thinks appealing in the right choice and that she would support an appeal process for me. Though DRAM242 is drama based, it is a completely new area of study, specificall technical production. Diving into something so alien to me felt both disorienting and impossible to handle given its crash-course nature. At the time of writing this, I do not know if I passed or failed DRAM242. If the mark is a fail, I would like to appeal to drop that course from my transcript as well, for the reasons outlined above. I am not looking for sympathy, or to exploit what I am going through for academic gain. I simply know that how I have felt has seriously affected my performance in these classes, and I feel very strongly that the final grades for ENG257 and DRAM242 are not indicative of my overall abilities as a student, but are reflective of the effects my illness has had on my life. And I request that these marks be changed so that I can continue to focus on getting better, and not have this follow me into the future, where I hope to have success regardless of my difficulties this year.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Tyler Mathews
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