Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: My name is Tristan Smythe and I am currently completing my 3rd year of study at Queen's. Over the past academic year, I have struggled greatly with my mental health. My fall semester marks were significantly lower compared to previous 2 years and I had made it a goal this term to get my grades back up to the range that I knew I could achieve. However, my winter 2022 semester started poorly. After I recieved some grades that were much lower than I had expected I became increasingly anxious. Staying engaged and keeping up to date on lectures and weekly assignments became increasingly difficult and I found myself extremely discouraged by the direction that my year had started to take. Thoughts of how I was going to fail my courses and what my parents would think of my decline plaugued me constantly. Although my motivation to succeed academically was still present, my ability to focus and submit work on time was severely compromized. I was taking far longer to complete any assignment, and found myself with a build up of overdue work that was getting larger and larger each week. My anxiety increased daily and I began to think about myself as lazy and a failure. I was embarrassed to speak to anyone about my academic struggles and continued to stress about what I was going to tell my parents and friends which compromized my ability to catch up on my work more and more every day. For many weeks, I rarely left my room and found myself even struggling with routine tasks such as getting out of bed or cooking meals. The guilt I felt for my failure prevented me from socializing with my housemates and peers, as I literally always had overdue work that I was anxious about submitting and recieving a poor grade on. I felt completely alone and hopeless.
It was at this point that I reached out to student wellness services and booked an online appointment. Previously, I had never spoken to anyone about the thoughts and issues that I was dealing with. In the first session, I answered a number of questions about my daily tendencies and was told they were answers indicating symptoms of moderate depression. The supported documentation included in my appeal was completed by my mental health nurse following the session. The following sessions gave me some relief, and we developed strategies on how to continue through the semester and move forward. HLTH101 and ENIN140 were elective courses that had assignments and quizzes weekly, and I had fallen multiple weeks behind in both courses. To prioritize my mark on the full year course BCHM310, we decided that appealing to drop these two courses was the best method of action. With these two elective courses dropped, my focus was solely on the BCHM final exam and final paper, as well as my final exams for HLTH 331 and HSCI270. I was able to successfully complete my end of year assignments for the 3 courses, and felt much more confident going into my finals with the amount of time I put into studying. If I can successfully drop both ENIN140 and HLTH101, I intend on retaking both courses in the future when I can complete them to the best of my ability.

Thank you very much for your consideration,

Tristan Smythe