Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: I am a 23-year-old exchange student from Maastricht University in the Netherlands and I am herewith requesting to drop DEVS220- Intro to Indigenous Studies and HIST258- Latin America to 1850: The Colonial Legacy. This is due to a long hospital stay after a medical emergency. On the 21st of October, I was admitted to the Emergency Room of Kingston General Hospital. I was kept there for further treatment and tests until the 29th of October. Currently, I am still waiting for results from some of the tests that were completed. I was not able to speak with someone from the International Programmes Office before the 2nd of November after which the deadline to drop classes had just passed. Furthermore, I was also not able to get the go-ahead from my home University to drop these two courses. This event has affected me in multiple ways which lead to my request. Firstly, this was a traumatic experience which I will have to work through with a mental health professional which will take time. This event is constantly in the back of my mind and thus makes concentrating for longer periods of time difficult. Secondly, I spent a week in the hospital in a foreign country and am still recovering my strength from that and the event itself which further means that I am unable to complete my previous workload and get tired quickly. Thirdly, the workload I was able to handle before has now become a source of high stress as I do not feel that I will be able to keep up with the assignments and catch up with what I missed during my stay in the hospital. This stress impedes my recovery and adds to the mental health challenges I am experiencing due to the event. I am not a student that likes to hand in subpar work which I would see myself forced to do would I continue with my full course load. Thus, struggling to keep up with the workload and still not achieving a level of work I am comfortable with handing in would negatively affect my mental health. All of this is combined with the circumstance that I am set to graduate in January from my home university in the Netherlands. To do so I only need the credits from two Queen??s courses. However, as per the requirement of my home university, I enrolled in 5 courses. I took an extra semester to come study abroad at Queen??s as I was not able to come a year ago, as planned. Thus, the two courses I am requesting to be able to drop will not count to my bachelor??s degree anyway. At this moment in time these two courses, sadly, just mean stress and I cannot enjoy them. I am keeping three courses as I need two to graduate and one of the three that would be left I honestly enjoy. This class only has one final exam left and the workload is minimal. This is a class that brings me joy which I think adds to my mental wellbeing. Furthermore, it is information that I think I will be able to use very well in the future. The two other courses will count towards my GPA and will be the two final courses I will take before graduating. If I were to keep a full course load of five courses I believe the quality of work in these two courses, which are important for my bachelor??s degree, would also suffer. This would add further stress which would again be detrimental to my recovery. If you look at my transcript you can see that I am a hardworking student and if it were not for taking an extra semester to still be able to go abroad due to COVID I would have graduated on time. Making this decision is extremely hard for me but I, and those who know me quite well, strongly believe that keeping on these two courses would be detrimental to my mental health and my recovery. Thank you for considering my request.