Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: I am appealing to drop BIOL 103 (W 2019), PSYC 100B (W 2019), CHEM 112B (W 2019), MATH 121B (W 2019) because of mental and physical health-related circumstances.

My experience at Queen¿¿s started out optimistic but very quickly started weighing on me negatively, starting with my dorm placement. With the lottery, I was put into a single dorm on West Campus, away from everybody I knew, and felt safe being around while in a new place, entirely on my own for the first time in my life. The transition from boarding in a private school was difficult for me to make, and along with my back injuries from a car accident that I was in prior to coming to Queen¿¿s that made the walk from Main Campus to West campus extremely difficult, I requested to be moved.
Already, I wasn¿¿t handling the isolation well, so when my request was denied, I felt like I didn¿¿t have a chance at adjusting, but I tried to make it work anyway. The people in my dorm building weren¿¿t particularly welcoming, which added to my growing frustrations, but I joined the dodgeball team and that helped for a while. Eventually, I started to withdraw from everything, and balancing school and my mental health became too difficult to deal with on my own, so I tried to contact someone with the school. I wanted help, but I didn¿¿t know what to do or who to talk to, and when I found the right place, the wait time for an appointment was weeks. I felt that maybe it shouldn¿¿t be a priority if it wasn¿¿t taken so seriously at such a large school, so I tried to ignore everything. When that burden became too big to ignore, I called my mom and told her that I wanted to come home, so she flew across the country to come to see me.
Making the decision to leave the school wasn¿¿t one that we made lightly, but everyone around me could tell that it was necessary and that I was drowning without any support from the school and secluded away from everyone I knew, too far from any family in the province to easily get there. I went through the frustrating process of trying to find someone to help me settle everything before I left and eventually ended up in the arts and science building, talking to someone there. She told me that I had done everything that I needed to when we had finished talking, and I believed her. I sat through exams, although I was embarrassingly unprepared for them, as I was thoroughly ready to leave and didn¿¿t have the energy to do anything but wait for that time to come. When it was time to leave, my sister drove up to help me move my things, and because I was unable to find the older student who helped us settle into the dorms, I sent him a message on Facebook and returned my key to the front desk of my building.
I wasn¿¿t aware until fairly recently that my transcripts had been locked and that I owed Queen¿¿s money for a time that I didn¿¿t even attend, the second half of the school year. I flew home to BC on December 16th and didn¿¿t think that there was anything left for me with Queen¿¿s.