Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Hi there,

I am appealing to drop STAT 263 (winter, 2014) in this appeal letter because I encountered several extenuating circumstances which were beyond my control during the final exam period.

I am Shu Tian, an international student who just started to study at Queen¿¿s university last fall, and it is not hard to imagine what hardship I have been through within my first year, such as cultural shock, difficulty of a transition from high school to university, and concern about my academic performance. I am always striving for the perfection, and I have been trying so hard to fit into a completely different environment since the school began, but I just felt that nothing was going in the right direction that I want it to be. Hence from March this year, I experienced a dark period of depression. I did not want to go to school, so I skipped some of my classes, and I practically shut everybody out from helping me out because I thought I was better without anyone around me. I cried constantly, and locked myself up in my room. The worst part was that I had trouble falling asleep at night, and my clock was a total mess. I usually could not fall asleep until 5 o¿¿clock in the morning, and even that could only happen with the help of alcohol. I need to drink every night to make sure that I can get enough sleep. After nearly half of month like this, I figured that I was in a desperate need of help, so I made an appointment with the school counseling department on 17th, and went there to talk with the counselor. Honestly I had more personal issues that made me had a mental breakdown but I really did not want to specify them again. Some person that I used to trust so much totally betrayed my trust, and that friend of mine and I were really awkward since then. After that talk, my sleeping pattern did recover a little bit, but it was just my attitude towards life was still really pessimistic. Let me just go ahead and say that I once had some suicidal thoughts, which were something that I would have never imagine myself to think about. What¿¿s more troublesome was my exam schedule. My first psychology exam started on Apr. 10th, and then I had three exams in a row starting from 14th, and they were Sociology, Math 121, and STAT 263 respectively. I had nearly no time to review for STAT 263 for I need to focus on those previous exams that were about to be tested first. Plus I had a severe cold ever since the exam started, and after staying up almost every night before the exam, the situation got worse and worse. I once had a fever which was 39 degrees at one night during the exam period, yet I still did not request to defer the exam, because the only thought at that time was for me to finish everything quickly and go home. And after I got back to China, it took me another month to fully recover from my illness. Under all those extenuating events that have happened around the exam period, I still made it through and took the STAT 263 exam.

As to my future plan, I want to major in Psychology, and STAT 263 is not needed for my major. I just chose to take it for fun in the first place. Furthermore, I am planning to transfer to universities in US for winter semester 2015, so GPA does matter very much to me. With a failed course on my transcript, it will highly affect my whole plan for transfer and my future, given I got fairly good marks in other subjects. Therefore, I sincerely hope the arts/sci department can give me the permission to drop STAT 263.

Thank you very much,

Shu Tian (10084723)