Twelve students from the Model United Nations club attended the Marymount United Nations conference March 18 at Marymount High School.
Though students said the school didn’t perform as well as it has done in previous conferences, Nicky Belgrad ’19 and Princie Kim ’18 both received an Outstanding Speaker Award and an Accommodation Award, respectively.
Club leader Carolyn Hong ’17 said that the experience was new for most of the students, even though all but three were experienced, because it was their first time in a single delegation conference.
“Having this experience was kind of a good practice round or a good way from them to train or hone their skills,” Hong said.
The conference, run by the Marymount Model United Nations club, was comprised of chairs made up of Marymount students. Because Marymount MUN was relatively smaller than most college conferences, the conference included fewer committees than usual. All of the committees were single delegation, meaning that each nation was only represented by one student.
To accommodate all students despite the fewer number of committees, Harvard-Westlake represented more nations than usual, including delegations from Ecuador, Finland, Poland, Russia, India and Mexico.
The delegations were involved in a wide range of issues, from sports to child marriages to ethics in drones, all of which embodied the Marymount MUN conference’s theme for the year, “Cracking Controversy.”
Students researched the history of their topics and nations to better understand their delegations’ positions on the topic.
“Model United Nations is a great way to see that there is a lot of connection and intertwinement between the sciences and humanities,” Hong said.
To prepare for the conference, the leaders of the Model United Nations club held meetings after school to teach students about the conference and to help with the research process. During the conference, Hong acted as an adviser and gave constructive feedback to the students based on her observations.
“It’s a fun and inclusive club,” William Evans ’19 said. “I like it because you feel a part of a larger community but don’t need to devote all your life to it.”
