Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Good Afternoon,

In this letter I am appealing to drop MATH 225, MATH 112, and HIST 269 due to my untreated depression and anxiety over the 2019 winter semester.

In my second year (fall 2017- winter 2018) I had a severe stomach illness that caused me to do very poorly in school and in life. My motivation was gone, I could barely sleep, and I would spend days at a time bedridden due to the pain. Any time I did go to class I felt extremely uncomfortable. I started getting proper treatment for my stomach in April of 2018. As the summer went on, my stomach was healing but I realized that my motivation and my mental state was not improving. At the end of summer 2018 I contacted a Psychotherapist to try and find out why I was feeling so abysmal. After a couple of sessions, it became clear that I had been experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety over the past year. Throughout fall semester of 2018 we worked through my experiences and I completed some homework and exercises to help me combat the depression and anxiety symptoms. The results were fantastic. I was doing well in school, participating in intramurals, and getting back on my usual workout routine. The symptoms had not completely gone away, but by the end of the fall 2018 semester I had gotten an A- or above in all my courses.

Winter semester of 2019 is when things started to go downhill. Over the Christmas break my dad and I discussed university costs and concluded that since I¿¿ve been doing so well, I could stop the biweekly sessions with Tim Sitt. A couple weeks went by in second semester and I found myself slipping back into some bad habits and mindsets. I started studying too late and losing more sleep, which negatively impacted my day to day routine. Without my biweekly meetings it was much more difficult to follow a schedule for the exercises that had led to so much success in the fall semester. Looking back, I wish I had started these psychotherapy sessions up again, but I was ashamed. Ashamed because my parents had paid for these sessions for a semester and I still couldn¿¿t be productive by myself. Ashamed because in order to efficiently manage my mental health I needed to ask for my parents¿¿ money rather than be able to figure things out on my own. My Dad told me after winter semester that he would have been happy to pay for the sessions if I had expressed my difficulty. But the truth is the longer I procrastinated asking for help the worse the motivation got. Why should someone as worthless as me benefit from receiving outside help This is a dark thought, but it sums up how I felt most of 2019 winter semester.

The three courses I failed were the ones I was taking solely in 2019 Winter semester. The fourth course (HIST 213A/B) I was able to get by because I had done well in the fall semester. After my three abysmal marks came back in April, I knew something needed to be done. I went to my family doctor, explained what I was going through mentally throughout the last year and a half, and he prescribed me anti-depressants. I¿¿ve been using them since April 2019, and they have steadily brought my motivation and mental state back to what it normally is. I now know what I need to do to be successful at Queen¿¿s University. With the combination of my medication, biweekly sessions with a psychiatrist, and meetings with a school guidance counselor, I will be able to return to my full potential at Queen¿¿s. If you would like to know what that looks like you can review my 2018 fall semester marks.

My plan for the rest of my time at Queen¿¿s is this: Continue in consecutive education until I acquire my first teachable in history and my second teachable in Math. (I was told by a consecutive education adviser that I am close to doing this) I also need to re-declare my major from Economics to History due to the courses I plan on taking. After I graduate undergrad (in 2021 as I¿¿ll need an extra year to finish the required courses) I will be applying to teacher¿¿s college. It is doubtful that I will be able to get into any teachers¿¿ college with three failed courses on my transcript. I spent half of this summer teaching grade 9 high school Math. I now know for sure my goal needs to be to become a teacher. The best way to start accomplishing this goal is to clean up my transcript so I can move on with my degree. My parents and I have discussed my options throughout the summer a lot, and we have finally decided that continuing my degree at Queen¿¿s is the best option.

Thank you for taking the time to read this email.

Sincerely,
Matthew DeFreitas