Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: I am writing today to appeal to drop GEOL 104 (Fall 2019, Fall 2020), GPHY 203 (Fall 2019), and GPHY 209 (Fall 2019, Fall 2020) past the academic deadline. I first enrolled in all three classes during the fall of 2019 but began to struggle considerably as I was living with undiagnosed PTSD from a series of events that occurred the summer prior and continued into the fall semester. During that semester, I reached out to Student Wellness Services and other mental health organisations in Kingston and, with their help, my mental health and quality of life improved dramatically post-diagnosis. Unfortunately, in prioritising my mental health, the semester was not as successful academically and I was unable to apply to drop the courses on time which resulted in two of the courses being failed and one being marked as incomplete. However, due to the help I had received at Student Wellness Services, my academics were able to reach the same potential as my first year again during the winter semester of 2020. I decided that, due to my rediscovered success in the winter semester, I would reattempt the courses I had taken during the fall semester of 2020, as the Academic Advisor I spoke to explained that it would be the best way to remove the negative grades from my transcript, since I had been unable to drop them at the time. However, my academic semester was extremely disrupted again when my father, John Boyle, became suddenly ill with cancer and passed away just before Christmas of 2020. After he received his diagnosis in November, I spent the remainder of the semester in Nova Scotia with my family, during the last weeks before my father passed, as his diagnosis was terminal. Throughout the current winter semester of 2021, I have been receiving help again from Student Wellness Services and have been registered with QSAS in an attempt to set myself up for a successful next semester again. I hope that, due to the extensive extenuating circumstances during the two semesters, I will be able to retroactively drop those three courses entirely and look towards successful future studies at Queen¿¿s instead.