Author: Morgan Lei
MHS has many large clubs students can participate in, from Interact to Hip-Hop Club to Speech and Debate. This year, Model United Nations was added to the already extensive list of clubs and they recently attended their first conference.
What is Model UN? In Model UN, each school has a country they represent. There are then various committees with different topics that students discuss and debate over as their country.
“As a club we go to different conferences and then we represent a delegation or a country when we’re there,” Club President Isaac Chang explained. “At our last conference, we represented the delegation of Iran and then we worked with other countries to solve various global issues.”
Since this was the first conference, no one knew what to expect, Club Vice President Darryl Remulla said. Despite this, things went well and Andrew Ha and Darryl Remulla ended up winning “Best Research Paper” in the historical committee.
“It was like a whole new experience, but it went really well. For the most part, people were nice there. It was really nice learning experience,” Remulla said. “It was very engaging, and we won awards at our first conference!”
In preparation, they had to use a lot of outside sources to help them understand how everything worked and what they needed to do, Remulla explained. They held study sessions to go more in-depth and overall, did a lot of research and practice, he added.
“After we got our members familiar with how everything worked to an extent, we started research, we wrote our position papers,” Remulla said. “We tried to have study sessions occasionally in which we went more in detail to the procedures of a committee session.”
Having represented Iran, next time they plan to choose a country that speaks English, Chang said. It was also difficult to represent them given Iran’s government.
“We knew it was kind of like a corrupt government, so it was really hard to represent them,” Chang said. “But also, all the policies weren’t in English, they were in cursive Persian, and it’s not something that Google Translate would take; so we couldn’t read most of the registrations.”
When founding the club with Ha, Chang felt that people need to be involved in global politics. Even though Chang is not planning to do politics as a career, he still has an interest in global politics, he added.
“I just feel like people have an obligation as people to be a part of [global politics] and I also thought it would be really cool just to experience the learning process of going to competitions, just ‘cause I’ve heard so many cool things about it,” Chang explained.
Club Member Jenny Pham joined Model UN to learn more about the world and other people in the world. Model UN is a great learning experience, and it is super fun, Pham added. Getting to learn about other countries that have less and have more problems makes you feel more for the world, she explained.
“It gets you out of your comfort zone. You have to go up and do these speeches,” Pham said. “You learn more about the world and it’s something that after that, you kind of have more compassion.”
Pham, wants the club to continue in the future. She hopes that she and other underclassmen try to continue it next year and until they are seniors, Pham said.
“I definitely want to make sure this club continues because it’s amazing, it’s so much fun, and you learn so much from it,” Pham explained. “We’re definitely going to try to continue it next year and until we’re seniors and so forth. Join Model UN!”
