Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: I am requesting to drop the course FILM226 after the deadline.
Half way through the semester, the sudden death of my grandfather required me to return home to Toronto for a week, and again return home for all of the following weekends for the rest of the semester to support my family (see obituary: http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/Deaths.20150207.93356360/BDAStory/BDA/deaths ). My grandmother was having an extremely difficult time coping with this unexpected loss, and as my mother and I are her only family members it was crucial that I return back home to provide support on these weekends.
Due to my absence from Kingston, I missed the initial deadline for a FILM226 essay, and while I was granted an extension, I found myself unable to complete it. This was because the other courses I was enrolled in had a significant amount of group work, and the deadlines for these projects could not be extended. I did not want to let my group down and wanted to ensure that I was still pulling my weight for these projects, so I allocated all my time to these efforts. Furthermore, in all previous semesters I had taken 4 courses per semester, and this was my first time taking on 5. It was an adjustment that I was struggling with, and the sudden loss of a family member and resulting time I was away from school made the course load even more difficult for me to manage. There were also no online resources (no Moodle page) for information about the course and its outline, which made it even more difficult to keep up with the work being assigned. Due to my absences on the weekends, I missed a lot of Monday classes as I was travelling back to Kingston. I was under the impression that these classes were movie screenings, so thought I could catch up later in the semester when I was done with my group projects for my other classes. I recently learned that the screenings had switched to writing workshops half way through the semester, of which our participation would account for 30 of our grade. I attended hardly any of these 226 classes, in addition to missing a lot of other of the screenings classes because I was trying to make as much time for my group projects as possible, as I was unable to meet with them on the weekends.
In order to catch up on my degree plan, I plan to retake this course next semester, which I strongly believe will be manageable along with a lighter course load. I also plan to keep in regular contact with the professor- such as emailing right away if I miss a class- to ensure I am keeping up with the course work.
Finally, I also plan on meeting regularly with a counselor here at Queen's to assist me with time and stress management. This will provide me with a support system that I am sure will be beneficial to achieving my future academic goals.