Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: To the Associate Dean (Studies)

I am writing to you to appeal to drop Chemistry 113 and 114 (Summer 2019). I did not drop the course by the drop date because I felt I could balance working 40 hours a week and taking a difficult summer course, but as more assignments came up it started to become even more difficult.

I have struggled with anxiety and depression since high school, and I am spending this summer seeing a therapist to try and work through these mental health issues. I need to work in order to pay for school, and I need to go to therapy to improve my mental health, so dropping Chemistry is one thing that would make it easier to improve my health. I know I should have been more aware of the timing of the add/drop period, and I looked into dropping it on the 1st of June, the day after the last drop date. I am hoping with my circumstances you will allow me to drop the course.

I stopped taking my antidepressants, with the help of my doctor, this summer in an attempt to regulate my mental health through therapy after negative side effects to medicine occurred. This event has been very difficult and has required a lot of hard work in therapy and out of therapy and I thought I would be able to handle the combination of that and work a full-time job, but I am having too much trouble balancing it all.

Dropping the course will allow me to focus on my mental health so that I can go into my fourth and final year at Queen¿¿s as healthy as I can possibly be. My grades have struggled because of my depression and anxiety, and so I hope that with this summer of therapy and improvement I will be able to finish my final year with higher marks. I would really appreciate you allowing me to drop this course so that I can finish Queen¿¿s with better marks.

I understand you must get many requests very similar to mine, and my extenuating circumstance may not seem like a very large deal, but for me it has made the past month incredibly difficult. There are days I can barely concentrate because of my mental illness and it has made it difficult to keep up with the demanding workload of a full year course in just the summer semester.

I have learned a great lesson in balancing my time and prioritizing my mental health and through that lesson I have learned that this course is only negatively impacting me. There is no way in which this course could lead to a positive outcome as I believe with my mental health as poor as it is right now, I will do worse than I did in this course when I took it in first year.

I do realize I should have dropped this course before May 31st, but I tried to push through it as long as I could. After realizing I would not be able to balance recovery and this course, it was too late to normally drop the course. It is not like me to be off schedule or off a timeline, so having to go through this process has been a lesson for me.

Thank you so much for your time and consideration, it is greatly appreciated,

Christine Kilmer