Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: I am writing this letter to appeal for a credit standing in two of my courses from this past year (Chem 112 and Anatomy 101) and to have my failed course (Biology 103) dropped from being included in my GPA.

In March, I had two close friends attempt to commit suicide within the span of a week. I was heavily involved in the effort to save them, and it left me emotionally drained and unable to focus on my academics. When the first friend tried to kill himself, I was forced to call 911. I supported him as people rushed to save his life and spent several hours in the hospital with him until he was finally deemed not to be an immediate danger to himself and was released. It didn¿¿t help my mental state that at the time I believed I was partially to blame, as he had been upset to find out that his best friend and I had started to date each other and did therefore not have as much time to support him. Later that week, I woke up to a phone call from another friend saying she was feeling incredibly suicidal and was going to go to the hospital and check herself in, and she asked for me to come and look after her. This meant that I spent several more hours in the ER waiting room. While those friends did receive help, the situations left me in a state of constantly being on guard, monitoring their moods and ensuring they were getting the help they needed. They often wanted to visit me and talk about how they were feeling and even though I had a lot of work to do, I felt unable to say no regardless of the work I had to complete or my own stressed mental state. In the long term, this translated into me not being able to study as much as I otherwise would have and instead forced me to often stay up long into the night to complete assignments once I knew they were safe and asleep. In week 12, for example, I made a schedule to complete all the work I had left to do for my courses and discovered that to complete everything I would have to stay up all night twice in one week, severely harming my own health and ability to focus in the process. This affected my three in-class courses of Chemistry, Anatomy and Biology. It luckily didn¿¿t affect the three online courses that I was enrolled in this semester as they had more flexible timelines to learn and complete the material. While at the time I did not feel as if I had been affected enough to seek help personally, the events that occurred shifted how I was forced to prioritize my time and my grades suffered because of it.