Petition Letter
Dear Associate Dean (Academic),
My name is Vicky and I??m a 4th year student majoring in Film & Media here at Queen??s University. I am appealing for Aegroatat Standing for FILM 236 and FILM 322 (Winter, 2020).
Near the end of the winter term in 2020 (April), I left Canada in a hurry and travelled from Toronto to Shanghai (where my parents live) on April 5th. Due to Covid-19, China was following the restriction of putting travellers arriving from other countries into a 14-day quarantine. After I landed in Shanghai, I was immediately put into a local hotel. However, during my quarantine, I could not work on the remaining final projects for FILM 236 and FILM 322 because the Wi-Fi/internet in the hotel rarely worked and I had no access to VPN - I was unable to access any academic related sources on my laptop except logging into OnQ and SOLUS, using Word, and accessing my school email.
I emailed the professor (Ian Robinson) for the courses, asking whether I could be exempted from the projects. Prof. Robinson offered me the option to complete the projects during the summer and hand it in before September while he gave me incomplete grades for the time being. I went through a lot of trouble but finished the projects over the summer using the limited resources I had at the time. However, I did not realise that the projects had not been successfully saved to my Google Docs as I was working offline without connecting to a VPN (the VPN Queen??s provided never worked on my laptop). Both projects were completely lost, and I could not be more frustrated about it.
I was going to try to re-do the projects, but the fall remote term was starting, and I had to focus on the new semester entirely which left me no time to work on the projects from the year before. Soon, I noticed that my grades on SOLUS have changed from incomplete to F.
The reason why I am appealing for these two courses only is because one of the courses that I took during the winter semester (GNDS 125) offered us the option to complete the course without submitting the final paper - if we decided not to submit the final paper, our current grade level for the course would be our final grade, and the final paper will be dropped from the calculations. The other two courses I took were FILM 218 and FILM 210, both taught by professor Dan Vena. I contacted him as well in April 2020 about the situation I was in, he was extremely understanding and agreed to exempt me from the final projects for FILM 210 and 218.
I think the Aegroatat Standing is the best option for me considering the fact that I put in a lot of effort into schoolwork, and if it was not for the pandemic or the inaccessibility of the academic recourses on the internet in China, I believe I would have completed both courses on time with decent grades.
In my future studies, I would try my best to make plans in advance just in case something like this happens, I would also better communicate with my professors to make sure nothing gets lost in translation. As for academics, I would consider adjusting my course load in order to achieve better performance in every course I take. I will also try my best to stop procrastinating on doing things, such as appealing for these two courses from a long time ago.
I would be grateful if you could consider by request - getting these six credits is crucial and would really make a huge difference for my academics since I am in my final semester at Queen??s and am planning on graduating in the spring.
Thanks so much for your time and I look forward to hearing from you,
Vicky Zhang
My name is Vicky and I??m a 4th year student majoring in Film & Media here at Queen??s University. I am appealing for Aegroatat Standing for FILM 236 and FILM 322 (Winter, 2020).
Near the end of the winter term in 2020 (April), I left Canada in a hurry and travelled from Toronto to Shanghai (where my parents live) on April 5th. Due to Covid-19, China was following the restriction of putting travellers arriving from other countries into a 14-day quarantine. After I landed in Shanghai, I was immediately put into a local hotel. However, during my quarantine, I could not work on the remaining final projects for FILM 236 and FILM 322 because the Wi-Fi/internet in the hotel rarely worked and I had no access to VPN - I was unable to access any academic related sources on my laptop except logging into OnQ and SOLUS, using Word, and accessing my school email.
I emailed the professor (Ian Robinson) for the courses, asking whether I could be exempted from the projects. Prof. Robinson offered me the option to complete the projects during the summer and hand it in before September while he gave me incomplete grades for the time being. I went through a lot of trouble but finished the projects over the summer using the limited resources I had at the time. However, I did not realise that the projects had not been successfully saved to my Google Docs as I was working offline without connecting to a VPN (the VPN Queen??s provided never worked on my laptop). Both projects were completely lost, and I could not be more frustrated about it.
I was going to try to re-do the projects, but the fall remote term was starting, and I had to focus on the new semester entirely which left me no time to work on the projects from the year before. Soon, I noticed that my grades on SOLUS have changed from incomplete to F.
The reason why I am appealing for these two courses only is because one of the courses that I took during the winter semester (GNDS 125) offered us the option to complete the course without submitting the final paper - if we decided not to submit the final paper, our current grade level for the course would be our final grade, and the final paper will be dropped from the calculations. The other two courses I took were FILM 218 and FILM 210, both taught by professor Dan Vena. I contacted him as well in April 2020 about the situation I was in, he was extremely understanding and agreed to exempt me from the final projects for FILM 210 and 218.
I think the Aegroatat Standing is the best option for me considering the fact that I put in a lot of effort into schoolwork, and if it was not for the pandemic or the inaccessibility of the academic recourses on the internet in China, I believe I would have completed both courses on time with decent grades.
In my future studies, I would try my best to make plans in advance just in case something like this happens, I would also better communicate with my professors to make sure nothing gets lost in translation. As for academics, I would consider adjusting my course load in order to achieve better performance in every course I take. I will also try my best to stop procrastinating on doing things, such as appealing for these two courses from a long time ago.
I would be grateful if you could consider by request - getting these six credits is crucial and would really make a huge difference for my academics since I am in my final semester at Queen??s and am planning on graduating in the spring.
Thanks so much for your time and I look forward to hearing from you,
Vicky Zhang