Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Greeting to the Associate Dean of Studies, I am writing this document to appeal against the order of academic withdrawal given to me due to my academic performances during the 2017-2018 school year. I would like to appeal to this decision, because this previous year of studies does not accurately represent my abilities as a university student, as I was affected by extenuating circumstances, that greatly inhibited my ability to perform my best as a student. The following letter will be separated into two groups, one being the Background and the other being the Academic Plan. In the background I will outline what circumstances I faced during the school year that inhibited my ability to perform my best as a student, and in the Academic Plan I will offer detail what I intend to do to prevent such a circumstance from happening again.

During the previous school year of 2017-2018 I was susceptible to strong bouts of nihilism and hopelessness which in turn gave me anxiety. These circumstances in turn eventually reached to a point where I isolated myself in my room as I became paranoid of dying and nihilistic on what life in general was worth.

To understand where I am coming from, in 2016 my uncle, Victor Carias Santos (aged 47) passed away after being diagnosed with brain cancer in 2014; and my grandfather, Nazario Antaurco Jacha (aged 62) passed away in 2015 due to a blood clot in the head from assault. These two deaths in the family hit me hard as both my parents were left devastated ever since, and it was my first real exposure to the subject of death.

These deaths implored me to think more critically about what dying is and what it meant to die. It seems foolish to think about such a grim topic, because even during childhood we all grasp the concept of death; we make toy soldiers and animals kill each other and what not. But we do not know what could happen afterwards, this topic was what troubled me so much.

My family is christian and believe in the afterlife, my mother believes that she will be reunited with her father, and my father believes he will once more see his brother. I respect their beliefs, I have nothing against religion nor those who follow it, however given my interests and background in science, I cannot share their beliefs.There isnt satisfactory evidence to prove their existence, and so I unfortunately believe that after death your conscious ends, and your body degrades into basic elements which is then cycled to the soil.

I do not know why this thought scares me the way it does, the idea that i will one day cease to exist, and given time, my existence will have been forgotten. Surely countless people are currently being plagued by this thought, and many people of previous generations thought of it too . It is obvious that all humans will eventually die, having studied the human body and degrading telomeres in particular, it would almost seem like we were designed to approach death over time. Of course we all know this but to see it playout first hand is something else entirely.

My uncle worked in construction applying drywall, he was a complete powerhouse of a man, but over time I saw how the cancer debilitated him and left him unable to work. The cancer starved his healthy body cells, he grew obese, and couldnt maintain a train of thought. To see how he degraded is incredibly disturbing and the memories bring me to tears. My father and his brothers are stoic, and easy to forget that they are people and not carved of stone. In my 21 years of living, my mother nor I have never once seen my father cry, nor any of his brothers. Yet my uncles condition crushed any of those ideas, my father was very visibly shaken, my infected uncle cried openly and my other uncles sobbed as well. Such an experience was very impactful, the scene plays out in my head constantly, and has taught me that you are never too young to die.

I constantly saw my life as a timeline, and my mind is so fixated on that last bit. I believe my fear of ceasing to exist gave rise to anxiety which led me to see risks of death in my everyday of life. Before i slept I worried that my rooms heater would break down and leak carbon monoxide as I slept, when walking to main campus I worried that perhaps an armed gunman would shoot up the campus. Whenever I drove, I worried that I would be a victim of a car crash. At the slightest headache, I worried that I may have developed the same brain cancer that ultimately took my uncle away. I felt great amounts of anxiety because I saw death at every corner, and I felt that the dangers were real, as both my grandfather and uncle died much earlier than they should have.

During the school year these fears and anxieties compounded further and further until I was convinced that going out of my room would one way or another get me killed. And so I stopped going to a lot of lectures and laboratories and my marks decreased as a result. Eventually I began to try to normalize these anxieties I suppose, by having a heavily nihilistic outlook on life. I began to think of things on a much grander scale and found it to be very depressing. On a grand scale, earth itself is less than miniscule in the face of the vast universe and you can see where this is going. Ultimately as people, the greatest leaders, empires and legacies, are all isolated on the planet and surely given enough time their memory will be erased.
What this nihilistic approach did for me was that instead of being paranoid of dying from improbable means, I now thought It doesnt matter, I will be gone given enough time, and this led me to this sort of a mental sinkhole, where you have this constant falling feeling which I could only call Despair; where you feel like every avenue of choice you have in life will ultimately lead to the same meaningless end. This was during the second semester and at this point I found it difficult to motivate myself to leave my room.

I couldnt talk to my parents about this, theyre country folk who believe in heaven and hell, and I dont want my own beliefs to ruin theirs. My mother believes she will see her dad in heaven, my father believes he will see his brother in heaven before the cancer took him. I dont want to ruin that nor take that away from them, and more importantly I dont want them to have the same thoughts I was experiencing. I simply cannot believe in the soul nor the afterlife, as comforting as it can be, I dont see the evidence for it. As for friends, I again didnt want to burden them nor give them these thoughts, but additionally I dont think they are mature nor knowledgeable to give me any constructive advice. As far as university resources I didnt know if i could talk to someone about personal matter like this, I was certain university resources was strictly for academic uses.
Even now, I feel bad for having to send you this and sharing those troublesome thoughts but I have to, in order to have an opportunity to return to Queens U.
I would like to clarify that although these thoughts and experiences are very dark, and unsettling, I do not have any suicidal tendencies, its the opposite as my fears come from dying. Suicide would be the complete opposite, given the choice I would like to live forever.

Since exams ended and the academic year ended, I came back home and funnily enough it was my little brother and sister who motivated me to fight against this nihilist mindset. Since I was 11 I helped raise my bro and sis as my parents both worked, and as a result I have grown very attached to them, feeling like a brother with the overprotectiveness of a parent. Being around them and being showered in their love, made me realize that I as a being have worth. The nihilistic view i had during school is true in that given enough time, our lives are largely irrelevant in the vastness of the universe, but we shouldnt compare ourselves to that scale as we people arent stars or planets. I grew to understand that holding ourselves to such a large scale is a foolish thing to do, and we should hold ourselves in the scale of other beings on earth. Eventually every current living person will be dead in the future as time progresses, and I grew to accept that the value of our lives lies in the moments and memories had throughout our lifetime. I searched up and studied the works of Friedrich Neitzsche, the views of Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking, and found comfort that these great scientists also had thought about death, and that they ultimately saw it as inevitable part of life enriching the value of enjoying life while you are still alive. I hope to have the willpower and strength to unflinchingly face death as Einstein did.