Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean (Studies),
This letter is in regards to the reason why I am appealing the Faculty¿¿s decision that I must withdraw from Queen¿¿s for a minimum of three years.
There were many extenuating reasons, beyond my control that I wasn¿¿t able to perform to the best of ability academically. During my one year withdraw, I applied to Bell and got a job to support my financial needs. As being hired with Bell, I worked part time to manage school with work. I worked roughly 16-22 hours a week. The way I managed my work life with school is the days I don¿¿t have many classes I worked and also on weekends. With this job, there was many reasons that had an impacted my life but mostly it is due to the fact that it took a psychological challenge on me with the results of my grades not being the best. The psychological challenge was caused by my work place manager. My manager created a hostile environment where I wasn¿¿t comfortable being there. As my manager sexually harassed me every shift, making the work place very unconformable and difficult to be able to go home and concentrate with school and other social aspects of my personal life. Due to his extreme way of making employees know he was in charge it was difficult for me to speak to anyone about this because I felt embarrassed. At times my manager would say racial slurs to me and physically assault me. There are number of things that he did to make the work place unsafe with the words he would use to describe certain things, speaking about my mother in certain ways, and all the unwanted touching every shift at work. Throughout the past year I have taken the time to write to HR multiple times but was never brave enough to send it due to not wanting to lose my only source of income if he was to find out. As a result, there was no way of getting away from him because he would always follow and make me feel so small and vulnerable because he would hold his position over me.
Although I tried to separate my work from my academic life it was very difficult because having to mentally prepare myself to go into work took a lot of my psychological being. There were days where I would wake up planning on going to class after work but after his putdowns and assaults I would go straight home not being able to socially interact with anyone let alone focus on anything. With the constant sexual harassment at work, I was unable to concentrate with all the work I had ahead of me because I was always feeling down or upset. Some nights it was very difficult to sleep. Managing my time properly was also a struggle because there was always so much on mind that I always started to overthink. This was also making it difficult to get a good night¿¿s rest and go to class and mostly it was the constant fear that always came across my mind on how will I get through work each day. With the constant stress and difficulty to concentrate it was a big impact on my studies as I couldn¿¿t perform the best with everything on my mind and also making it problematic for myself to address the situation that I was in. My work experience was a big factor in my psychological challenge that I was facing because it was an environment that no one should have to go through. Although my manager was caught on camera for the assault and fired in April this experience still has an effect on me sexual harassment had demoralizing effect on me and everyone within range of it, and it had impacted my performance with work and my academic schooling as well. With my manager being let go from the job as of April 3rd, 2018, I was finally able to come out and speak to my HR about the incidents that occurred. With the help of my HR and becoming confident and okay to speak about the events, I was able to go to counselling through my work. This also enabled me to finally open up to my parents about what was occurring and the mental stress I had not speaking about. If needed be my district manager can verify all that I said to be true.