M-A’s Model United Nations club hosted its second annual Menlo-Atherton Model United Nations Conference on Saturday. This was the club’s first independent conference after co-hosting their conference last year with the Golden State Independent Delegation.
This year’s event was a major success, offering high school students across Silicon Valley the opportunity to strengthen their public speaking skills, increase their worldly knowledge, and form lasting connections with others.
Senior Lilah Chen, who served as Secretary-General, was responsible for much of the organization behind the event. “I do all the administrative stuff; I’ve done all the assignments, planning, website, pitch, committees, and assigned emails,” she said. “It was a lot of work beforehand to get the conference to happen, but it’s been really fun.”
The conference consisted of General Assemblies, Specialized Committees, and a Crisis Committee. The two General Assemblies focused on global issues: the Economic and Social Council discussed rare earth mineral trade, while the UN Development Programme debated over urbanization and overpopulation.
Three Specialized Committees tackled further topics: the International Olympic Committee focused on performance-enhancing drugs, the U.S. Senate debated medication affordability, and the World Health Organization addressed human cloning and cryonics. Finally, the Crisis Committee went back in time to recreate the debate regarding the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Before the conference, participants, called delegates, were required to submit research papers describing their assigned country’s background, their committee’s topic, past actions taken on the topic, their country’s current stance on the issue, and their proposed solution. Delegates with outstanding and extensive research, judged by the committee chairs, were granted awards during the closing ceremony.
Arush Krovidi, a junior at Amador Valley High School, was one of two chairs serving for one of the sessions. “As a chair, my primary role is to mediate the discussion between all the delegates,” he said. “I make sure to mediate the entire conversation and debate so that everyone, in a civilized manner, discusses and debates their ideas and can come together to solve the problem.”
MAMUNC provides a space for rookie students as well as more experienced members. “It’s a really great opportunity,” Silicon Valley International High School junior Lukas Wittig said. “The chair is super helpful. They have been showing the beginners how we do the procedure. The other students did very well.”
Each conference is unique, and M-A’s small setting made the event more intimate. “In a smaller conference you get to really hear other people more and have everyone speak,” Wittig said. “In the bigger conferences, like the ones at Berkeley, you can’t get a word in.”
In the end, the MAMUNC was a resounding success. The event offered something for everyone, from seasoned delegates to first-time participants from all over the Bay Area, to enjoy.
“The fun thing about conferences, is they will only ever exist once. You will never have the same arrangement of people in the same place again. While each individual delegation from a school will probably go to other conferences and you’ll probably see a couple of familiar faces, there’s never going to be another time where all these people are together,” Chen said.
