Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Ishira Bharadwaj
20010234
Academic Appeal Letter

Dr. Jenn Stephenson,

I am appealing to drop CISC 101 (Winter, 2019) due to extenuating family health circumstances and mental health issues.


Due to unforeseen family health issues beyond my control combined with increased anxiety, I was unable to focus my time and attention adequately to this demanding course. With a history of anxiety, known to affect my actions, sleep and eating habits, ever since grade 12, the family health issues had significantly increased these symptoms. Throughout first year, I had seen Dr. Friedman in Victoria Hall for my anxiety as well as went to an anxiety clinic in my hometown. While I had learned coping strategies to deal with my anxieties, trying to implement them during this emotional time was difficult. These anxiety therapists had also noticed depression-like symptoms, including lack of motivation or action, during my times of severe anxiety. While I believed I was doing everything I could to cope with these symptoms during the last couple weeks, the ability to create and understand the code I needed to learn for the quizzes and assignments due every week became increasingly difficult and only served to increase my anxieties. The 5 other courses I was taking, not only count towards my degree but did not exert the same amount of pressure to spend hours on weekly assignments or quizzes that only increased my anxieties more. I can say I did not give up on this course, as I sought help from numerous people I knew who knew Python (the coding language we used in CISC 101), to help teach me so I can perform better. This only helped to an extent, due to anxieties acting up once I felt I didn¿¿t understand a concept leading me to think of the consequences a bad grade in this course can do to my future and the pressures I face. On top of this, learning more and more information on family health issues every couple days, with their condition not getting any better certainly had my attention divided as well as increased symptoms. Why did I not seek help from a therapist I genuinely thought I had spent enough time with therapists to believe I knew how to cope with all this extra stress, but evidently, I couldn¿¿t due to these unfortunate circumstances beyond my control. These family health issues seemed to be improving with proper hospital care, yet complications arose that prevented that family member from even travelling back home. The timing of these conditions not getting better combined with higher course load demand from CISC 101 proved March to be a time of a hard battle with the anxiety and other accompanying adverse symptoms that greatly affected my ability to participate in this course. A cycle occurred where my inability to participate in this course due to anxiety & other symptoms only greatly increased my anxieties due these actions affecting my grades, affecting my GPA, affecting my applications to post grad, affecting my life.


I believe that I was not properly prepared to deal with these circumstances in a healthy way during this time, thus affecting my performance and future participation in this demanding course. When/if faced with unfortunate circumstances in the future such as this, it would be in my best interest to seek counselling prior to the symptoms getting out of hand and affecting my schooling.

Thank you for your time in considering this appeal.

Ishira Bharadwaj