Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean,
I am taking a gap year for the 2019-2020 academic year due to extenuating circumstances concerning my physical and mental health from last year. Because of these circumstances, I am also appealing the Faculty¿¿s decision to count five Fall 2018 courses as dropped after the last day to drop without academic penalty (which encompasses CHEM 281, CHEM 282, BIOL 102, MICR 270, PHGY 215).
I am very sorry to be in this position. My physical pain started soon before first year of university, in May, 2017. I learnt that my menstrual pains could not be healed by painkillers, which left me in pain and made me sometimes pass out. The same level of pain occurs on a monthly basis. In the latter half of my first year, I was prescribed with birth control pill to manage the pain by doctors in the student wellness center. This physical pain has lessened, but it continues in my second year.
I began seeing a counselor regarding my mental health at the end of my first year. During meetings with consular, I expressed a sense of detachment from the social circle surrounding me because I could not find like-minded friends. Moreover, my family had put me on high stress. I was informed early in my first year that my mother participated in a cult, and just the summer of second year I was informed that my father who supported me financially gambled and wasted more than 4 million dollars on a leverage system to invest in stocks. In my second year, because all of these circumstances, I could not focus on all my studies and thus I decided to focus on solely BIOL 201/202. In the late summer of second year I felt overwhelming stress that slowly built up into a symptom of depression that occasionally gave me suicidal thoughts. In early third year, I begin to see another consular in order to manage stress. I¿¿m worried because my mother¿¿s side of my family have a history of mental illness. My grandma was diagnosed with schizophrenia; my mother refused to seek mental help but participated in a cult; and my brother was not long ago diagnosed with bipolar I.
I failed the five Fall 2018 courses in my second year because I thought I had dropped them but forgot to double check. I thought I was only registered in BIOL 201/202 and only worked on that specific course. I didn¿¿t participate in any of the other courses. I realized in April 2019 that I was still registered in PHGY 215/216, but I could not study any more when I was studying BIOL 201/202. I tried to defer the exam for PHGY 215/216, but because there was too much in the course content and the test covered a full term, I decided to give up and struggled more with the stress on my mental health.
Sincerely,
Yixuan Lin