Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: To whomever this may concern,

My name is Giovanni Sicat and I am in my 3rd year here at Queens. I am looking to late drop two of my courses for this semester (RELS 218 and POLS 285) due to some extenuating circumstances.

I'm not exactly sure how much detail I'm supposed to go into, so I guess I'll just give the whole story:

For the past year and a half now, my dad has had lymphoma which is a pretty serious case of cancer considering he has a pretty big tumour in his head. When we found out, I was still in Kingston which is approx. 2 and a half hours from home and school became decently hard to balance but was still manageable for the time. By consequence, I would travel home bi-weekly to go see my dad, take him to his treatments so that my mom would have an easier time balancing her work schedule with caring for him.
A little fast forward to first semester (Fall 2022), my dad had been going steady with his treatments and things started to look a lot better. As a result, I was able to limit my trips home and focus on my school work and things started to return back to normal.
Fast forward even more to about a month and a half ago, me and my family had found out that there was no more that the doctors could do in terms of treatment. Inevitably, my dad was going to pass away within a couple months.
Evidently, this news was gonna affect me somehow but I wasn't sure to what extent it would. I thought I'd be able to balance school and whatever was going on at home just as how I was during first semester. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case. My full course load became very hard to handle for me personally. Between thinking about my classes, my own personal mental health, comforting my mother through this difficult time, and spending as much time as possible with my dad, life was hard to say the least. Throughout this time, I've tried my best to keep up with my classes as much as possible by staying up to date with assignments and attending as many lectures as I could; unfortunately, I couldn't cut it and my grades in certain classes suffered by consequence. At some point, in my head, I figured that I could just give up on those classes and do them during the summer or later on in my academic career.
The instructions given above suggest that I should add what steps I have taken to deal with these circumstances and to be completely transparent with whoever reads this, I have yet to take any. This situation is still ongoing and as a result, I see myself calling for help after the fact.

My intention and hope here is that I would be able to drop these two courses so that my transcript wouldn't suffer as a result of whatever circumstances were going on at home. I understand that my lack of effort in these certain courses is my own fault due to me dealing with all of this stuff on my own time and for that, I can only ask that you (or whomever else this may concern) could help accommodate me for these things.

When it really comes down to it and I ask myself: how has this situation affected me?, I find it hard to really qualify exactly how I've been affected. If I'm being fully transparent, obviously
it has affected me mentally, and it has caused me to be absent (both literally and figuratively) from my courses. Other than that, it's hard to really say or rather, I guess I'll find out soon.

The last thing I'd like to add is that when I would drive my dad to his treatments, the one thing he would always consistently tell me is that his only request was for me to try my best in school no matter what happened. I understand it's a little corny but, I don't want my failures in these courses to be what I have to show to my dad while he's still here. Optimistically, I would like to be able to prove to myself and to my family that this is a not a reflection of what I'm able to do in school, but rather, I could do a lot better given better circumstances.