Model UN Back in Action

In late December, I, 2 teachers and 12 other students went down to Temple for a Model UN conference. The conference was hosted by the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, and was simulating an emergency Global Counterterrorism Forum. Our goal was to work with students from around 20 other schools to come up with short term and long term policies.

Model UN delegates at Temple University.

Every delegate was given a country, region, and stakeholder group (military/intelligence, NGO, multinational cooperation, or diplomacy) to represent. For example, I represented Saudi Arabia in the Middle East confronting military/intelligence. With other students assigned to those same three roles we all worked together to create our policy recommendations. At the end of the day a panel of three experts listened to our presentations and then picked the best regions presentation, which happened to be the Middle East.

Madison makes a point during deliberations.

I thought the day was extremely interesting and I actually had a lot of fun doing the research leading up to it. Since you had to be so familiar with your country and their situation, you had to do research on many different levels. During the day, we would vote on different proposed policies and actually got into a few debates about why certain countries opposed certain ideas. Overall, I had a really interesting and eye-opening experience and I can’t wait to get more involved with Model UN.

-Madison P. ‘18

Editor's note: The GA Model UN will head north to take part in this weekend's Model UN conference at Boston University.