Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Hello,

My name is Cole Perkins-Marini and I am writing to appeal the deadline to drop a course due to certain extenuating circumstances. Early into the term, end of September, I unfortunately began to experience palpitations and heart pain... I went to two hospitals, at the second one I was misinformed that I likely had a condition inherited from my grandpa which would likely require open heart surgery and had the possibility of causing instant death. Thankfully five weeks later I received an ultrasound which showed this was not the case, not that there was nothing wrong, just that I wasn't in the instant death bracket. The original news however seriously affected my mental health, coupled with the pain and palpations themselves it was nearly impossible for me to focus on my studies, in fact it made it rather difficult to focus on just about anything at all. My studies suffered greatly, so over the course of following weeks I dropped two courses and tried to retain three. It quickly became clear to me that even this was too steep of a workload given my condition and the affect that stress was now having on me physically... so I decided in hopes to retain at least two of my original five courses to drop a third course. Of course, it wasn't until after I had written the email to the teacher that I discovered the deadline to do so had passed. I would like to emphasize that this is not a habitual behaviour for me, and that I was deeply saddened and disappointed both with certain circumstances outside of my control but also the effect that it ended up having on my life and studies. I am hoping to get things back on track as best and as soon as possible and have my life retain a sense of normalcy once more... I remain undiagnosed, due to covid it has been extremely difficult to be seen by healthcare professionals but I am awaiting results that should arrive on the 30th of November. I hope that with the dropping of this course I can maintain my remaining two and be on track to pick up a greater workload next term. I appreciate all you can do to help... and sincerely hope that this is the last letter of this nature that I write.

Thank you,

Cole Perkins-Marini