Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: To the Associate Dean of Arts and Science,
My name is Savannah Hall (student number: 20154201) and I am appealing to drop the online course PHIL 203- Science and Society.
Over the past year I have been dealing with severe challenges with mental illness. Last year I attended York University for the Space Engineering program. As all engineering students know the course work is vast in quantity and never-ending. Being away from home for the first time changed my life drastically and I refused to acknowledge the changes. I tried to live a normal day to day life. Unfortunately, I made a few strong friendships that were very one-sided. I struggled to find acceptance, belonging, and companionship within my friends as well as trying to accomplish school work through the never-ending York University CUPE strike. It wasn¿¿t until my first attempt on my life that I realized how damaged my mental state was. I have since returned home to Kingston in attempt to distance myself from York and find solace with the true friends and family I have here. I enrolled in Queens Online to try and create routine for myself. I thought it would help bring me focus. Unfortunately, two out of the three courses I originally enrolled were completely uninteresting to me. In healing, my mental state varies drastically and makes it very hard to accomplish basic tasks or even to leave the house some days. It is very hard for me to put effort into anything currently and even more so into something that I am not interested in. This causes my academic performance to be significantly lower than when I function normally. Coming from an engineering background, philosophy is completely out of my normal course material. I wished to try something new and try to discover if engineering was what I wanted to continue in. I have learned that my academic passion is for physics, specifically in astrophysics. This course is not something I am interested in. I am still dealing with the aftermath of the events that passed, and I find it very hard to focus or will myself to do any work. I have been unable to accomplish many of the course assessments and fear for my academic standing.
A few weeks ago, I received my official offer to join Queen¿¿s in the fall for its astrophysics program. With this offer, I must keep a specific GPA and I am concerned this course will cause a large drop to my GPA. I am very excited to be able to start pursuing my passion academically to receive a degree. I am hoping that come the fall I will be able to get back into my academics and be able to focus on them as I could before I went through traumatic events at York. I am currently seeing a psychologist in town. He is helping me discover more ways to cope with my metal illness, and how to lead a normal life with them. He knows I still struggle with my motivation and my mood. We work together to make sure I do not fall back into the pit I was in last year. I will continue to see him for a while as he is very helpful to creating stability in my life. As I continue my life path, I¿¿m hoping to join Queen¿¿s and accomplish many things with the Physics department and pursue all that I am able to.
Thank you for taking the time to read this letter and consider my appeal to drop.
Kind regards,
Savannah Hall
Student number: 20154201