A Student's Perspective on the Model UN Trip

On Tuesday, November 5th, 2019 myself and a group of four other students headed to Monterrey, Mexico for a three day Model United Nations simulation. Myself, Julia High, Gloria High, Kaylan Patel, Eshan Ali had been preparing for this conference for months and were ready to showcase our knowledge to other students at the conference. Model UN is a simulation of the United Nations, where we are given countries to represent, separated into committees. We are then given topics to research and then give opinions on how to solve or deal with them based on what our country would believe before coming to a resolution with the whole committee. I represented the country of Iran, and was given the topic of the “prevention of the militarization of the Arctic”. While that was my first topic, there were also crisis topics, which were my favorite part of the conference. This is where a group of students at the school had come up with different situations that our countries have to work on solving. These weren’t topics that we had researched before, but using the knowledge we already gained about our countries we had to deduce how they would react and create a resolution paper that the whole committee agreed upon. Because of the committee that I was (General Assembly), many other committees would come in and pitch resolutions to the problems they were facing, then we would vote on whether their resolutions were valid or not. This was an incredible thing to witness, as it greatly heightened my awareness of issues that I’d never even thought of before. One of my favorite nights on the trip was a delegate party, where everyone at the conference was gathered and we had a homecoming-like party. All of the music was in Spanish, and it exposed me to so many new dances, new music, and a new culture. It was a truly unique experience, and there are very few places you could go to gain a similar experience to that one, as it allowed us to be so immersed in the beautiful culture. In the mornings before the conference, we were able to sightsee around the beautiful city of Monterrey, before heading to the school for the day, we went to places such as the Riverwalk, the mall, and several restaurants that stayed true to the culture of the city, as well as the country. Altogether, the experience provided us several opportunities to be immersed in this unique culture, exposed us to several international issues, and raised our global awareness significantly. ~ Tessa Best, Grade 10