Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean:

This is student Youxi Qian, with student ID 20028563.I am appealing to extend ECON452 (Fall, 2020) ECON232 (Fall, 2020) and ECON437 (Fall, 2020) to INcomplete grades.so I can complete these courses, and graduate with a B.A. Honours in Economics.

I am a serious and dedicated student, but hrough a major part of my studies at Queen??s I have suffered from some very difficult circumstances that have affected my mental health. More recently, due to the Covid pandemic after 2020 June, my mental health condition become worse than before. I was diagnosed with a major depressive disorder by Queen??s psychiatrist on October 02, 2019, and was recovering with the help of medicines and the mental therapy with Dr. Arunima Khanna before covid. But due to COVID, I became very isolated and was also having difficulties getting in contact with my professors which affected my depression very much. In May 2022, I was diagnosed as bipolar disorder with anxiety disorder by the professor of psychiatry from Peking University.

Due to the impact of Covid, all university??s courses changed to online courses in Fall 2020, everyone was isolated from other classmates from home. But the biggest problem for people with bipolar disorder was that online course for us hugely impacted our mental health condition. I had difficulty to handle the daily work as my anxiety disorder caused lots of uncomfortable physiological response during the Fall semester 2020. Like experienced shaking, physiological paralysis, and difficulty to breath often during Covid period.

All those symptoms cause the difficulty to catch up all the works from the online courses specifically for the first Fall semester 2020. I asked for extensions to hand in the course work late with the help of Dr. Arunima??s letter of support but did not get any response from the professors. Maybe professors did not notice what was going on with my condition and hadn??t give back many positive responds. I felt very bad and waited to hear back from my professors, but this did not happen. Meanwhile, I was afraid to get any special treatment at that time to hand in my work and I gave up trying. My parents were also upset and so I thought of giving up my goal for an honours degree and instead of changing the graduation to general degree later after May 2021. However, this winter I noticed that I received the scholarship from Schraven Brother provided by Queen??s department of Economics and want to give myself another chance to try to hand in all the course works that I finished very early before 2021 April.

Hope to get the permission from the Associate Deans to extend the incomplete grades period from Fall 2020 semester. Because I really want to graduate with an honour degree and study future Master fields in Economics. My counsellor Dr. Arunima has been encouraging me to write to you and explain my situation. I really want to complete my degree and I know that I am capable of completing it this time. I hope that the Associate Dean can review my grades from 2021 Winter semester which shows that after I adapted online courses, I work hard, positively cooperate with treatments from Queen??s and get reasonable grades. Also, I get the internship offer from Huatai Securities (also named HTSC) this summer, which is the second largest securities enterprises in China. Hope this can also prove that I do work hard and want a chance to do better.

Best Wishes,
Youxi