Petition Letter
I am requesting to waive the 21-day appeal deadline. During the period of Winter 2012-Winter 2013, I suffered from a debilitating mental illness that interfered with my ability to perform well academically in many of my classes. Thus, I received three failing grades during this time. In the summer of 2012, I went to a cognitive behavioural therapy session, and my psychologist diagnosed me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. This severe anxiety made it extremely difficult for me to participate in my occupations in life: focusing on school work was hindered my anxiety and depression (which I will soon explain), and even getting out of bed in the mornings felt impossible due to my suffering mental state. During this time period, I felt so weak that I even considered dropping out of school. However, I decided to see a cognitive behavioural psychologist regularly and to take medication to ease my disability and simply stay in school. Throughout the course of my treatment in this time period, my psychologist diagnosed me with major depressive episodes. As I stated earlier, my severe depression coupled with anxiety made it extremely difficult for me to perform in my classes. Simple tasks such as getting out of bed to go to class seemed impossible to me. Thus, due to this crippling medical issue, I was unable to even entertain the idea of appealing my failed grades within the 21-day deadline. I was overwhelmed with my state of health, and also with starting again in my new classes. Moreover, I did not even know that I could retroactively appeal my grades until recently a professor told me that I could. This professor, who has been following my progress in History, told me about the appeal process, and mentioned that he knows of students who retroactively dropped their courses past the deadline. As I have recently been doing well in classes--attributed to my regular use of medication and therapy sessions--I've decided to apply to the professional school of Occupational Therapy. I want to enter the field of occupational therapy because my longstanding volunteer work with people who have disabilities sparked an interest in the professional field of improving peoples' quality of life. I now realize how I would've benefitted during my first few years at Queen's with the help of an Occupational Therapist as well as Queen's University Disability Services. I just enrolled with the latter very recently. But unfortunately, I did not know about these services at the time; and my mental state rendered me unable to access all of the opportunities to help me. But now, I'm doing much better in my courses, and I utilize the many resources and services at Queen's that are here to help me. I'm currently receiving one B+, As, and several A+s in my courses at the moment in the demanding discipline of History, and I no longer have issues getting out of bed to attend class, or performing daily occupations; for the past year and a half, I've been able to manage my anxiety, and I haven't had any serious depressive episodes recently. I attend all of my classes, engage with my course material, and participate to the best of my ability. My current state of well-being is reflected in my good grades during this semester and last year. While discussing my earlier academic record (particularly the three Fs) with my professor--in light of my decision to apply to OT--he told me that he didn't believe that mu failed grades in 2012-2013 indicated how I could actually perform academically. Like my psychologist, he told me that because my health was compromised, I thus could not concentrate and fully apply myself to my academics, and more specifically, submit an appeal before the deadline. He also offered to write me a supporting letter for this appeal if need be.