Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: To the Associate Dean,

My name is Ismail Pirzada (10125867), currently enrolled at Queen's University and facing an edict to withdraw for a year due to my failure to raise my GPA to an appropriate standard after having been placed on academic probation.

While my student records may indicate me as a domestic fee-paying student, the truth is that even though I may possess the documentation qualifying me for citizenship, I hadn't resided in Canada on a permanent basis since childhood prior to arriving in Kingston in the summer of 2014 to begin my undergraduate education at Queen's. Kingston was, and still is, the smallest ever municipality I've ever had to live in on a daily basis. My adjustment to my novel surroundings was horrendously poor, and I confused my privilege with competence in regards to how I approached my academic life.

I suffered from and still somewhat do, albeit with ongoing treatment a severe bout of depression beginning in my second year at Queen's. It had nothing to do with culture shock. My spoken and written English is exemplary and I'm fully familiar with the social norms of southern Ontario; I simply found myself in a place so alien that I withdrew completely from public life as a whole. Having grown up abroad in the Middle-East and elsewhere in bubbles that were populated by the children of expatriate professionals, I felt I couldn't establish even the most basic of relationships with most of the individuals that make up the student body at Queen's. I allowed the unresolved grief over having to move to snowball into depression, apathy, and a total lack of self-care.

Starting from second year, my final marks for each course slowly began to fall lower and lower with each passing semester, with the added connotation of me being unable to open up to my family members about my exact issues. A glance at my transcript reveals an obvious pattern wherein I'd continually fail Economics classes at the 200-level and attempt to repeat them, while loading up on mundane-yet-simple summer term courses for the sake of anchoring my GPA to the point of not being requested to leave the university as a whole. This past academic year, I retracted from day-to-day living so thoroughly that I outright missed entire midterms and final examinations, as my prior anxiety simply imploded to the point of self-harm and two separate suicide attempts - one of which took place as I tried unsuccessfully gain roof access to the JDUC due to it being the only accessible building at odd hours.

A combination of repeated failures in prior attempts at identical courses, aging parents in a foreign land who had to balance their retirement financing with the payment of my tuition fees, and a mixture of shame and embarrassment led me to simply not appearing for both lectures and assessments in every course I was enrolled in for 2017-2018 barring HIST258 which I scraped through via basic prior knowledge of history developed throughout high-school. My professors would not recognize me if I had wandered into their halls/office-hours, and nor would have the students enrolled in the same courses. Hardly anyone in the Economics department, in fact, would be able to positively identify me if shown a photograph. I simply didn't exist in body and mind in relation to Queen's as an institution, and my extra-curricular activities beyond first and second year were non-existent. I didn't make any attempt to seek counseling on campus (except from a brief stint with the Bounce Back program), whether it be through the Peer Support Centre or the highest levels of psychiatric care provided by physicians.

I believe that asking me to withdraw for a year and requesting that I resume my studies in May of 2019 instead would serve as a massive pressure valve on not only me but my family as a whole. I've already had to scram to find subletting for my already-signed lease so as to avoid a massive 7000 CAD disappear into a black hole for renting an apartment in a town I may not even return to for a whole calendar year. The additional financial burden of keeping me at home, with added costs of travel and an ever-worsening currency valuation of the U.S Dollar in relation to Canada's has already placed my household in a slight tiff. I also feel that my academic trajectory, additionally, would be compromised to the point of irrelevancy seeing as I ideally can only graduate from a Queen's Arts program with no legitimate chance at graduate school given my academic record.

I've already begun seeking psychological and psychiatric treatment via Ms. Marcella Olavarria M.A, C. Psych Assoc. at the CFIR in Ottawa, whose documentation letter will be attached at a later date. I sincerely hope my appeal managed to highlight the exact extenuating circumstances that led to such a dreadful, apathetic student being present on your campus grounds.

Regards,
Ismail Pirzada (10125867)