Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: To whom it may be concerned,

I am writing to drop courses WRIT 225, BIOL 330, CISC 121 and PSYC 370 from Summer 2014 and the courses WRIT 295, PSYC 251, ECON 111, and COMM 200 from Winter 2014 after the 21 day deadline. I am also appealing the 21 day deadline in order to appeal for credit standing for SOCY 122 for Summer 2014. This past half a year I have not been myself. Beginning in the winter, I found myself unable to focus on school work. Eventually this led to me ignoring my school work entirely.

My head-in-the-sand attitude continued throughout the winter and in March I completed a professional school interview. I believed I did quite well in the interview and unfortunately continued to neglect my studies. Ultimately I tried to drop the Winter 2014 courses far after the deadline and was unable to complete the process. Despite the failures on my transcript, I was convinced that by registering for more courses that things would work out. With the new courses in the summer term I continued to complete little to no course work, believing my course completion was ultimately unimportant.

Clearly this was not the case. I was unable to graduate and consequently I have given up my spot at Western medical school which was to start this fall. Since the beginning of September my life has been a bit of a mess and I have been working to sort through everything. In hindsight, while my circumstances are unfortunate, they do provide me the opportunity to recover and reevaluate my health and direction in life. My long term goals are currently unclear, but moving forward in the short term I know what I need to do.

I wish to complete my degree and stabilize my mental health. To this end, I have added my sister to the list of people with access to my academic information. My parents and I have also worked out a regular weekly review sessions to monitor both my feelings and progress. I hope to complete my coursework independently, but will lean on my family for support should the need arise. I will be visiting my psychiatrist on a regular basis for treatment of bipolar type II as opposed to unipolar depression as in the past.

I hope this letter is helpful in understanding what I was going through. Ultimately, I do not believe I was in a fit psychological state to perform academically and I wish to appeal the 21 day deadline to drop the above listed courses from the Winter 2014 and Summer 2014 semesters and apply for credit standing in SOCY 122.

Sincerely,
Garry Lu