Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: To whom it may concern,

I am writing this letter as a submission for an academic appeal, in order to be granted permission to join the LIBS 100 online course past the set deadline.
The transition to university, as well as feelings of dissatisfaction from my program, led to a substantial amount of stress and anxiety. My mental health has been challenged in these several weeks of university more than it has been for most of my life, and those feelings have led me to question studying music at a post-secondary level. Through the set BMus plan I was automatically enrolled in many core courses, and thus only allowed to select six credits worth of electives. I regret not selecting other arts courses as my electives, as opposed to additional music courses, in order to balance the material I would be studying. I also failed to realize that starting my first year of university with seven courses in each semester was something I should have anticipated would be more difficult to handle than I thought at the time.
The culmination of the stress of balancing a high number of courses, my feelings of frustration with the music program, a lack of balance in course materials, and general feelings of doubt and anxiety led to me needing to take a week away from lectures and studies to return home and attempt to recuperate. I most definitely did not foresee this situation happening, as I have always been the kind to work things through to the end, but the overall structure of the music program had -- and continues to -- disenchant me with the thing that, for the longest time, I was certain I wanted to study.
During this week I tried my best to regain some mental strength and confidence, and it was here that I realized I needed to both lower and balance my course load. Through a lot of thinking as well as consulting with my parents, I found that my mental health and overall happiness with my studies was much more important than staying in courses just for the sake of saying I did.
I have lowered my course load by dropping a few full-year courses, and I wish to drop one more and replace it with the LIBS 100 course in order to add some variety to the material I would be studying this semester. This is where my appeal comes into play, and I hope that I will be permitted to add this course into my studies, for the sake of my mental health and my happiness.

Sincerely,
Sara Raahemi
Student ID: 20060766