Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean of Studies,

I am appealing to drop PHYS 453 (Winter 2016), the fourth year physics laboratory course, without academic penalty. I understand that I have missed the deadline to drop a course without academic penalty, but I had believed I would be able to manage with the course and have just recently come to the realization that I will in fact not be able to do that.

Due to circumstances beyond my control I have fallen behind in this course and have recently come to the realization that I will not be able to catch up. The circumstances to which I am referring are as follows. This summer my sister's fiancé passed away suddenly. He had already been basically another member of the family for the past ten years. Furthermore, I was one of the few members of my family that was there shortly after his passing. It was a very traumatic experience for me and I have been coping with the memories and emotions all year. In October I had a couple of counselling appointments to help me with coping strategies. I had been managing fairly well for most of the year. However, over reading week I saw my sister and seeing her again caused some of the memories to resurface. This has caused me to have difficulty focusing on my schoolwork. As a result I have begun to fall behind in some of my courses, particularly in PHYS 453. I had believed I would be able to catch up on my course work once I had gotten past my emotional rough patch but that proved to last longer than expected. In the past such feelings would usually dissipate after about a week and I would be back to my normal self, but this time the feelings have lasted about three weeks so far. I believe this may be due to the high amounts of stress and pressure I am under. The course also has a fairly heavy workload which I now feel I am too far behind in to be able to catch up and the stress of trying to catch up is causing me to fall behind in other courses as well. I feel that I would be better off dropping this course so that I would have more time to focus on the courses that I still have the opportunity to do well in. Furthermore, the stress of this course is causing me to feel overwhelmed and making it more difficult to move past this emotional rough patch I am experiencing. I think that getting back to feeling like my normal self and succeeding in my other courses is more important than attempting to get back on track in this one course.

My plan for completing my degree in a timely manner is to switch my degree program from the Astrophysics Specialization to the Physics Major which does not require PHYS 453. I would then only be missing 3 credits and would thus enroll in a summer course. With this plan I would meet my degree requirements at the end of the summer and graduate only a semester later than I had planned. This has been a difficult decision for me to come to as I had been very much looking forward to graduating with my classmates and getting the Astrophysics Specialization, but I feel that I will not succeed in this course and would rather graduate a semester late than have to stay for another year to retake the course.

Sincerely,
Alison Merritt