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Petition Letter: I am appealing to drop MATH280(Fall,2018) and MATH281(Winter,2019) and CISC124(Winter,2019)
I've experienced mental issues(depression and anxiety) and some related physical issues(sleeping, eating disorders and frequent headache and pain of body) from last year late November until Now.
The reasons of the occurrence of the issues are basically triggered by a series of events happened in last Fall term. Since at that time I haven't decided to choose whether math or computing as my major, so I take the mandatory courses from both majors, I made this decision based on my pretty well academic performance in the first year of both majors. However, the workload of two majors was quite hard for me to handle, as kind of a perfectionism, I became really anxious about my grades (at that time I was hoping to get excellent grades from all the courses, signs of imperfect to me were even intolerant). As frequent anxiety attacks and the last date of dropping courses approached, I made a rush and irrational decision of dropping two core courses from both majors(even then I was doing not bad at that two courses, but my twisted cognitive problems caused me to do so).
Things became even worse when I found out this irrationality will lead to further problems, I've found out I might not be successfully graduated in time, this given my growing up environment and education in China, and for me personally as a perfectionism was a unacceptable thing, and since I just came to Canada for a year and not very familiar with the education system and all the problem solving resources, all of a sudden I became really anxious and shameful, afraid to reach out for help. From then(last year late November),I've lacked all the motivation for study and completely isolated myself from all the people and locked me in my room all by myself.
This situation has severely affected my life and academic, I became highly stressful and overreact to outer stimulus, panic and feel shameful even when I encountered my roommates, I was not able to attend all the courses from then and complete the final exam of MATH 280(fall,2019), so I failed this course. The reason why I pass the other two courses(CISC203 ,CISC204)is that the grading method of this two courses is based on 5 small tests(each made up of 20 mark, and can drop the lowest mark),since I was normal mostly from September till early November, so I did pass this two courses.
Self-isolation made me really depress, I endure mental and physical issue and even self-harming issue. My parents are the only social support I am willing to reach out help to, so I came back to China last winter break and told them about the situation, things became brighter when I came to home, I thought I can overcome my difficulties and also I still cannot accept the fact that I was about to miss the whole winter term, so I came back to queens and take the winter courses. But the lasting effect of my depression still haunting me, I was in the bipolar cognitive state of thinking I was going to survive and going to classes verse thinking everything was screwed up, isolate myself and avoid outer environment once again. During this bipolar process, I dropped 3 courses and still, not successfully dropped the other two courses(MATH281, CISC124).
I pretended I was doing good before my friends and pretended I was not home and going to all classes normally before my roommates(by making no sounds at my room and not even go out and eat). However one day, a friend of mine came to told me that he has noticed something unusual about me, and he told me how he was also having serious mental issue when he came to Canada for the first time, and he told me about the supporting system queens have for such issue and constantly told me not to avoid but to positively solve all the problems, so I finally reach out for help and having counsellor, academic advisors and career advisors involved to help me with the whole situation.
Since I gradually open up myself for help, so I think in the future, I will positively connect with people, and with the help of counsellor and support system from queens and my friends to deal with all my issues.
Given the mental and physical pain I endured, I'm now quite thankful for the whole thing, they teach me many lessons, especially the fact that even painful, I was able to discover and introspect into myself the some topics deeper. In the future, the mental issue is not only something that I will constantly dealt with the help of all the social support,(the main thing is not isolate myself and avoiding people) but also something that I want to help with others, I found many students are quite vulnerable to mental issues, and the Chinese students especially ,mostly handle the problem by avoiding and self-isolating instead of reaching out for support, because there is a strong sense of shame concerning with this issue in China. When talking about mental problem, there are even popular saying of ---not something very serious, you just overthink too much, I have friend who also have the same problem but not willing to tell anyone and go back to China and cannot finish the school, and even heard of suicide attempts of my friend also because of mental issue.In the future, this is something I want to get involved and make actions to help in my spare time.
As the future plan for the academic, I am grateful for the situation I had to get to know more about academic and knowledge. I found myself especially interested in the topics of theology, metaphysics and epistemology and also philosophy of mathematics. And also I am open to other interesting topics. During my self-isolation time, I get to immersed myself with a lot of philosophy and mathematics readings and found myself fascinated by the beauty of them, I get motivated, not only just by the wide applications of certain major, but by its essence, the true beauty of knowledge, and what motivate me most, is the eager to find the truth, the immortal truth concerning human civilization and the whole universe.
And also I found out, my existential crisis happens when I somehow think my existence value has been threaten, even until I enrolled into queens, I find my self-value highly depend on my academic performance, broadly speaking, on my acquisition of knowledge. when it was threaten, I search out for other value but simply see nothing, I fall into nihilism and find my whole existence as meaningless, but that is not the case, meaningless is not the answer, so is naturalism. I have figured out this as a whole and my belief system will help me as well with the following challenges.
Thanks,
Juanyu Lin
Student no.20079507