Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean,

My name is Abdelrahman Mohamed, and I am currently a Queen's University undergraduate student in the process of graduation. Over the past few years I had experienced various emotional and personal issues that have unfortunately hindered my ability to achieve constant academic excellence. My constant need to achieve this excellence was how I completed 2 high school diplomas(IB and American Diploma) alongside a successful athletic career.

On October 9th 2015, my father who was my role model and best friend suffered a brain haemorrhage that unfortunately caused him to fall into a comatose state. His illness came during a time in my life when I had finally figured out how to thrive for academic excellence again after a tough first year, and that can be seen in my second year grades when compared to my first year grades. My father has been a patient at Providence care since 2016, he receives mental and physical therapy to try to recover from his brain haemorrhage. Given the severity of his case, he needs to receive emotional support from his family daily in order to have the motivation to work on recovering to regain partial control on his movement and speech. Ever since 2015, I have experienced an enormous amount of pain and anxiety from his misfortunes. I reached out to the counselling services on multiple occasions when I was going through a severe depression due to my families circumstances and even though I went consistently for a period of time unfortunately I didn¿¿t find much comfort in their services. His illness has caused me and my family a tremendous amount of stress and additional responsibilities that took a toll on me over the past 2 years. I tried to escape my issues by directing my focus on my academics, but unfortunately my stresses took over and instead of asking for help and accommodation from my professors I became hesitant and sheltered myself which translated equivalently on some of my grades. Given that I was the oldest son I had the responsibility of helping my mother care for herself who was going through a terrible depression herself, and my younger siblings who were confused, depressed, and scared about growing up without my father. That along with the stress that a full course load had on me, along with the frequent visitations to my ill father at the hospital to try to keep him positive about recovery took a huge toll on my mental wellness, and translated into my grades and relationships with the people in my life.

Over the past summer, I had the opportunity to work on my personal issues and find comfort in speaking with my family and friends about the issues I have been experiencing, and the toll of putting everyone else¿¿s needs on top of mine, and was able to find clarity in how to get my life back on track. Thankfully with the help of my family and friends over the past academic year I was able to balance my academic life and family. I have been extremely active this year with all my course load and worked extremely hard on ensuring that I graduate this year, while maintaining a balance at home for my family that lives here. I believe that I should have asked for accommodation for every course that I have taken ever since my dad¿¿s illness since I truly believe my grades during that period weren¿¿t an accurate reflection of my academic standing, but unfortunately during that time I was too hesitant and hard headed to see that I needed help from an outside source, and believed that I could handle all of it myself, which I now understand was a foolish decision from an 18 year old who was blind sighted with all his responsibilities.

There are very few professors in my faculty that know about my current situation including the Chemistry department head, and professor Igor Kozin, who have been extremely helpful with their accommodations to ensure that I complete my course work in time for graduation including my CHEM 397 grade. During my third year I wasn¿¿t able to complete many of the course components year since I was out of the country for almost 4 weeks and was unable to make up the work during that semester given all my family stress. Most of my other professors were unaware of my circumstances and therefore weren¿¿t as helpful, or accommodating when it came to fairly assessing my academic standing. All I am asking for at this point is a fair assessment of my academic standing, and hope that you could see from what I have explained that I am a good student who was put in a difficult position during his academic career, and that the responsibility of caring for a family at my age put a burden on my academic success during that period of time, hence why I am appealing for credit standing in the courses I believe aren¿¿t an accurate representation of my actual academic standing, alongside dropping the grades that I wasn¿¿t able to perform well in due to my circumstances. Given that I am keen on pursuing graduate studies in the near future, I wouldn¿¿t want my misfortunes that translated into my GPA to hinder me from pursuing a higher education, and I only ask that you would grant my appeal to allow me that opportunity.

Kindest Regards,
Abdelrahman Mohamed