Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Essi Amegbeto

21st August 2020

Appeal Office

Appeal Essay


Greetings to the appeal office,

This essay is to appeal having my grades from the courses Introduction to Biology of Organisms, Introduction to Biology of Cells, Principles of Economics, Principles of Psychology, and Differential and Integral Calculus on my official academic transcript; instead there would be a P for pass. To clarify further, the proposal is that the accreditations from the aforementioned courses be indicated by a CR opposed to the actual numerical value.

This essay will outline why I chose to come to Queen¿¿s as an international student from Ghana, to what I attribute the causation of my poor grades in Introduction to Biology of Cells, Introduction to Biology of Organisms, Principles of Economics, Principles of Psychology, and Differential and Integral Calculus and the steps that I took to ameliorate my grades. My hope is that a multi factorial analysis and explanation of my final grades will be considered enough that the appeals committee concur with my pass or fail mark proposal.

I selected Queen¿¿s University for its academic notoriety and because I was under the impression that it would be feasible to try out for the Queen¿¿s women basketball team. I had understood there may be basketball tryouts open to the undergraduate student body. I received this information through the lead coach, Mr. Dave Wilson, on May 1, 2018. See attached. I arrived nearly a week earlier than the commencement of classes, specifically on the 28th of August of 2018. I went into the gym and came out in tears when the staff had no idea of anything I was saying when I asked who I could speak to about trying out for this team now that I was in Canada. This is part of an ongoing trend, or arguably, a pattern of disrespect for one¿¿s time and money that I feel I have faced at Queen¿¿s and at the bare minimum is a notable corollary to my poor performance in first year.

To proactively address how to best use my free time, as it had become more apparent to me that I would not play competitive basketball, on September 12th, 2018 I joined an intramural volleyball team. It was going well but it turned sour when I began to perceive that I was not good enough to enjoy playing. This false understanding of my skills and abilities was the first moment of depression. My perceived lack of skill was not just in volleyball but in my ability to navigate Queen¿¿s university both academically and bureaucratically. To elaborate, my self-esteem dropped relative to volleyball and my classes, and I was still genuinely disheartened by being led on that it would be feasible to try out for the basketball team. These transgressions lead to me spending less and less time playing volleyball and studying as I felt that I could not navigate Queen¿¿s well enough to be holistically successful.

Two months into the semester, I stopped playing intramural volleyball and found myself slowly slipping into an intense depression. I would quantify this depression as me not being able to keep up with the days. During that epoch of intense depression, I attempted to keep up with my studies and I tried to find out how international students could be admitted to the team. During which I had many saddening comments from ARC front desk receptionists indicating that I had no chance of playing basketball for Queen¿¿s as I was told that the coaches would usually pick their roster nearly twelve months before the academic year.

As someone who had come with a background of playing varsity basketball, volleyball, and soccer for the last four years of her education, it was a blow to my ego, arguably this further contributed to my depression. This is also a waste of talent; many international students are talented athletes who would be beneficial to the sports teams. Playing a team sport was something that was part of my life; and what I found out to be the only way I balanced my life effectively. Meanwhile, I found that in addition to that, I had one more reason I could not focus on my studies, the back pain I was experiencing. To elaborate my back pain made it difficult to function and contributed to my depression.

Through a doctor at the then Student Wellness Centre at Lasalle building, I later came to recognize what the pain was stemming from which I do not want to disclose. I had to get the necessary prerequisites for my first physical therapy appointment which was on October 10, 2018; said appointment was one of many appointments that semester that I had to go to for some momentary relief. They began weekly and soon after I had bi-weekly appointments. Things slowly progressed, but I had a lot of studies to catch up as I could not sit at a desk or sleep without feeling pain. To exemplify the severity of depression I applied to change dorm rooms at the end of first semester, also in hopes to have a bed that I didn¿¿t fall off of. Falling off was due to my disorder because I would turn countlessly to ease the pain, had I known that someone my height could request a room with a bigger bed, I would have simply done that before coming to Queen¿¿s. I switched rooms in the middle of the second semester.

To catch up with my studies I had booked appointments with Lindsay Heggie, an academic skills specialist at Student Success Services (SASS), on the 14th and 29th of November 2018. She helped set up a schedule which I kept up with and thanks to her, my diligent efforts, and the other programs at SASS I covered enough to pass the majority of my courses. In December, I had reduced back pain and I had found a way to manage. My last appointment that year was on December 11th, 2018 because I wanted to prioritize studying for December exams.

Second semester had arrived, and by now I had the confidence in myself to keep on doing the regular daily exercises to manage the pain and I was not ready to give up on myself and my grades. I looked for anything that would provide me with a drive to improve myself; I was recommended to the PEQ program early in February through the Health Promotion Hub. Beth Blackett put me in touch with Schuyler Schmidt who is a Registered Kinesiologist to make sure I wasn¿¿t damaging the progress I had made with my back pain.
Long story short, Personal Training Coordinator Tiffany Bambrick put me in touch with a personal trainer Bryce Ritchie and I was supposed to start the program in late February of 2019. He missed our initial meeting, and never responded to an email about rescheduling, this was rude and unprofessional on his part, and this made me think yet again that I could not succeed at Queen¿¿s because I felt so inept at managing the bureaucratic part of the student lifestyle at the university. By March 20th, Beth did a follow up where she put me in touch with another trainer- Luis Illas. Hence, I started the program on March 28th, and I saw progress in my mental state and even in my grades for the four weeks I had been with him.

Between first and second semester, I started talking to a counsellor about reducing the pressure from my expectations for myself to have perfect grades. He was an on-campus councillor named Mr. Woolnough Freeman, whom I had met in the middle of his transition to British Columbia and so he put me in touch with Nadia Fehr for the second semester. This lack of continuity pertinent to a student with a known lack of mental health is, in my opinion, questionable at best on the part of Queen¿¿s. Unfortunately, we never met as planned; I went to her office for our meeting, but her front door was shut, and she did not answer. I was again disappointed. Next, I opted for another councillor at the end of second semester but this time through Student Wellness Services.

In conclusion, I am not proud of any grade that came out of that year because I know that I could have had better grades were it not uniquely for my circumstances of poor mental and physical health that were in no way aided by Queen¿¿s university. It took me about seven months to be in a healthy physical state. In one of those months I experienced my first panic attack and called the Kingston helpline and then tried to cope with the help of friends. During that year I never entered the gym to exercise, it was too traumatizing for me; I would say that this neuroticism and phobia is proof that my mental health was too poor to be a functioning university student.
I would like to acknowledge that I have objective data points from AP Calculus AB and the SAT where I performed well on the class and the exam. From this it should be extrapolated that from a sheer competency and conscientiousness point of view I can succeed in higher level math and science but that due to extenuating circumstances I performed poorly. Also, please take into consideration that all this was happening during a time most immigrants would experience culture shock. If culture shock had solely accounted for my bad grades, which I considered, I may have accepted this and simply transferred out of Queen¿¿s to a university I felt more comfortable in but I was not able to even apply to transfer into a university elsewhere in Canada because of my then GPA. Leaving me to feel cornered.

I was, in my opinion, unable to spend more than 5 hours per day, and 35 hours per week reviewing the material outside of my five classes in first year due to my illnesses. In justification of my previous statement, my issue made sitting to study quite literally painful to the point of making it seem less comparatively valuable to study than not because of the pain it would cause me. To validate, I can tell you that I would get up and stretch every 10 - 15 minutes. This was further validated by my physical therapist, Mr. Michael O¿¿Meara who encouraged stretching every 15 minutes if it reduced the pain. Obviously, lectures and tutorial sessions were even more difficult because my classes are a minimum duration of 50 minutes. I would always sit at the back of the auditorium to avoid distracting other students and, in some auditoriums, it further impeded my learning because it became difficult to hear the professor and participate fully in terms of answering questions.

I felt that I was in too much of a pain to attend some classes, lectures and tutorials. I would estimate I attended 78 of classes. There were approximately eight mornings where I could not get up without crying because of the physical pain. Additionally, with the lack of sleep I had daily acute migraines and that made it more difficult to understand the material and due to sheer pragmatism, I did not want to take pain killers or acetaminophen so as to avoid becoming dependent on any sort of drug.

As of 19th September 2018 and 18 January 2019, the last possible dates to drop courses without financial penalty for the semesters, I thought that I could manage to pass with good marks. I thought this because in September I had no symptoms of the source of pain that were outwardly noticeable, so I assumed my rough start to the academic year was uniquely due to the basketball team misunderstanding. As per second semester, I again thought I could achieve good grades because most of the academic grade distribution of my classes were split by 50 percent per semester and I assumed nothing else could or would go wrong. Unfortunately, circumstances shifted and said circumstances proved to be difficult to handle on my own as indicated in the previous paragraphs. Four out of the five classes were full year classes, which meant I could drop them on March 1st, but I literally could not afford to drop courses valued at nearly 40,000 CAD without accreditation for the courses. As a comment, I realize it might be uncommon to the university¿¿s staff but the concept of dropping a class had never been a consideration for me, before then the concept was in fact foreign. Furthermore, even if I remove the 6,000 CAD entrance scholarship I earned, my mother and father worked to pay the entirety of my tuition, residents and spending money. It seems obtuse on the part of anyone and everyone, to suggest I should have just dropped said courses.

Subsequently, without much comprehension from class notes the tutorials were only occasionally helpful as the tutorials would build on previous material that I did not get the opportunity to memorize. In my estimation, out of a cumulative 100 of the course¿¿s grade for Introductory Biology of Cells and Introductory Biology of Organisms courses that is derived from the exams, quizzes, tutorials, and assignments, I would say that I attended to 100 of the tutorials, 85 of the class, which were mandatory for participation marks, and completed a cumulative 100 the assignments expected of the course. Additionally in my estimation, out of a cumulative 100 of the course¿¿s grade for Principles of Psychology course that is derived from the exams, quizzes, tutorials, and assignments, I would say that I attended to 90 of the tutorials, 85 of the class, which were mandatory for participation marks, and completed a cumulative 92 the assignments expected of the course. Furthermore, in another estimation, out of a cumulative 100 of the course¿¿s grade for the class, Introduction to Principles of Economics that is derived from the exams, quizzes, tutorials and assignments, I would say that I attended 50 of my classes, which were not mandatory for participation marks, and completed a cumulative 100 of the assignments expected of the course. Finally, in my estimation, out of a cumulative 100 of the course¿¿s grade for the class, Differential & Integral Calculus that is derived from the exams, quizzes, tutorials and assignments, I would say that I attended 70 of classes, 100 of tutorials, and completed 95 of the assignments, I did not hand in two assignments which cumulatively were valued at 5 of the total grade given to the assignments section of the course.

To elaborate on the quality of my assignments, I tried my best to turn in assignments on time because I thought turning in assignments was better than not at all. This resulted in many rushed assignments turned in with attempted answers. I performed best in Introduction to Sociology because the information from the class was analysis based, and thus absorbable, as opposed to memorization based. To expand, it was difficult for me to memorize facts, which is the key to success in biology, economics, bio calculus, and psychology, as compared to sociology. I was more successful in sociology because I am a strong reader and writer so the grade I received is more of a result of me working hard in the course opposed to how well I can memorize information, which was made too difficult from the various conditions I was suffering at the time.

I hope this letter finds you well,
Essi Amegbeto