Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean (Studies),
I am writing to appeal my courses MATH 121, CISC 102 and CLST 103 for credit standing. I had a very painful and stressful time this last semester causing my grades to suffer. I don't mean to make excuses for my poor grades as this is my own fault and I do take full responsibility, but I would like to explain my situation during the term and how I plan to deal with it in order to avoid any interference with my academics in the future.
During the beginning of my first year second semester on February 12th, I took hormonal contraceptive for the first time and it took a huge turn on my mental and physical health that I did not think would affect my studies to this extent. I was suffering from nausea and headaches which caused me to sometimes miss my classes as well as it made it hard to focus on work. Due to my constant nausea, I became malnourished and tired as I was not eating enough. It had also interfered with my menstrual cycle causing me to bleed for two weeks straight when I first started taking it as well as experiencing painful severe cramps making studying difficult. I went to the clinic immediately and was diagnosed and told these were just symptoms of the birth control and would go away soon as my body became used to the pill. I also suffered from a bladder infection which was also extremely painful and further added to my discomfort and kept me from being able to work efficiently and focus properly. I went to the clinic March 2nd and was given antibiotics that also had side effects that gave me headaches and an upset stomach which again interfered with my study habits. I continued to take birth control in hopes that the side effects would soon stop and was prescribed my second two monthly doses of the pill on March 6th. Towards the end of March and beginning of April, my nausea and headaches went away but I started to experience abnormal menstrual bleeding and had my cycle twice in one month with extremely painful cramps causing me to go running to the clinic again. Going to the clinic continuously for these medical reasons often took a lot of my time and often caused me to sometimes be late to class or miss it all together. I was told again that these were side effects of birth control and so I decided to stop taking the pill immediately. At this point, I was so behind and my workload became unbearable as I had weeks worth of material to catch up on for MATH 121, CLST 103 and CISC 102 which were information heavy and relied on memorization. My MATH 121 class had a lot of online weekly assignments such as a pre-class questionnaire, web works and in-class participation questions that were hard to complete when I was trying to catch up on work from the previous weeks. It embarrasses me that I overestimated my ability and tried to catch up on the material instead of communicating with my professors, causing me to become overwhelmed with all my work and content of missed classes eventually causing me to do so terribly on my final examinations for this term.

I have since then stopped taking birth control my symptoms have disappeared altogether and I am confident that I am able to continue my coursework and improve my academic progress. I am willing to do anything to improve my grade in these courses to prove myself as I feel these current grades do not reflect my true academic ability or work ethic at all. I also now understand that I should have reached out to my professors instead of trying to balance the workload on my own. I regret this deeply and am meeting with an academic advisor about avoiding these problems in the future as well learning how to realistically manage my workload and making use of all the academic help provided here at Queens.
The most important thing to me is my education and I would love to graduate from this university with a GPA that reflects my true academic ability and in the future, apply to graduate school. I hope you will grant me a second chance. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain myself. I appreciate your time and generosity.

Sincerely,
Aaliya Noor Haider-Shah