By Alice ’21
I joined the HW Model United Nation (MUN) team when I was in 10th grade and I am currently the vice president of the club. My experience in the club can be summed up by one word – awesome.
I first joined the club because the club leader at the time, Will Evans, was shouting at the top of his lungs during the club fair, asking everyone walking by to sign their names on the sign-up sheet. As awkward as I am, I cannot just turn away and thus I, almost unwillingly, wrote down my name. That ended up being one of the best decisions I made during my time in HW.
A little background about me and MUN. Before 10th grade, I had some experience in Lincoln-Douglas and Public Forum debate but because I was unable to fulfill the time commitment for debate, I could not continue. Model United Nations is essentially an activity in which students act as delegates from different countries to discuss and debate about different topics and to try to find the best possible solution for their own countries. The person that shows the most leadership and best speaking skills is awarded Best Delegate. I personally believe MUN is much less competitive and cutthroat than debate yet offers almost the same amount of opportunity to practice critical thinking, public speaking, and leadership. Plus, it re quires less time commitment, which is perfect for me.
However, Model UN not only offers me the intellectual rigor I was looking for, it also has given me some of the best memories in high school. Our MUN club was smaller when I joined and all of the club members eventually became a little family by the end of the year. As a new 9th grader and an immigrant (I moved to the USA in 9th grade), I always felt like I couldn’t fully blend into the community. I always think that outside my little friend group, I am not connected to the bigger student community. MUN definitely helped me to feel more included and make me more like a part of the student body as a whole. I was able to be great friends with people in my own grade whom I was not familiar with before; I was able to make friends with people in the grade above me and learn from their experiences; by the time I was a junior and the club’s junior representative, I was also able to be friends with people in the grade below me and guide them through how to do conferences and make speeches. What’s more is that through conferences, I am able to meet students from other schools all over the country or even all over the world. Every conference is an opportunity to make new friends and strengthen bonds with your teammates.
Overall, MUN is the whole package for me. It’s hard for me to recap everything I love about MUN in a simple blog but hopefully, you can get a sense of what it’s like through my brief introduction. I would love to answer more of your questions about either our MUN team or my experience in the club!
