You’ve probably shared a class with them. You can’t tell by looking at them, but they’re different. Every couple of months they disappear for several days, shedding their names and identities. They return with murmurs of off-policy Russians and drug possessing Belarusians. No, they didn’t give up their lives to become part-time spies; it’s something much more sinister, much nerdier.
Model United Nations, the means through which nerdy teens can pretend to be nerdy adults; a club where your wildest dreams can come true, if those dreams include arguing North Korea’s nuclear policy amongst pea coat donning teenagers with an affinity for flag pins.
Essentially, Model UN is debate, not like a presidential debate, but something closer to what you see on C-SPAN. Your goal is to convince your peers that your resolution and your ideas are the most important, while using some of theirs.
Taking weeks to prepare, delegates immerse themselves in a world they may have never known otherwise. Studying the goals and beliefs of the country they will soon represent, they learn that their typical Western beliefs may be wrong.
If you were Iran, you would never want to remove your nuclear weapons just because the western imperialists (United States) want you to. You would much rather make them remove their weapons first, and then you’d follow suit.
The club is based on the real United Nations, where nations from Angola to Zimbabwe meet to solve the problems of the world. In Model UN, the final goal is to create a resolution that will get your nation’s goals across with as much support as possible. This support comes in the form of signatories, where a nation puts its name on a resolution signifying that it is confident in the effectiveness of the solution. Well, that’s the official purpose…
Being a club composed of teenagers, there are ulterior motives involved. All Model UN delegates can be placed into three categories, each with their own goals: nerd, slacker, bro.
The nerd’s goal is to win the best delegate award, through the garnering of support for their resolution in the form of signatories. The slacker typically comes from a school that offers Model UN as a class, and goes on the trips for the purpose of missing school, while getting credit. The bro’s situation is similar to that of the slacker’s, but they have ambition that the slacker lacks. The bro enters the conference with the purpose of gaining not signatories, but phone numbers.
These three groups’ goals cause a very interesting dynamic within the committee rooms. While the nerds are getting to business trying to talk about the problem at hand, the bros are in the back, passing obscene notes and saying “Very nice!” (a la Borat) anytime the delegate from Kazakhstan speaks.
“[At the last conference] the delegate from Belarus was definitely a bro. He spent all of committee sketching pictures and playing tic-tac-toe with the bombshell from Iran” said ROHS senior Emma Green.
After three days of intense debate, or flirtation in the case of the bro, delegates are given a break in the form of the delegate dance. Most members of the ROHS team opt out of attending the dance, due to elitism, and a small amount of fear.
For you to understand how disturbing a delegate dance is, you have to imagine the ROHS Homecoming. Now, with that image in mind, remove all the jocks and cool kids. Replace all of them with the type of kid that is followed around all dance and mimicked. And finally, add international politics.
The last event of the weekend is the award ceremonies. All delegates head into the main hall and sit in anticipation of who will win the awards, well, at least some of the delegates are excited. While the delegates expecting awards listen to every word leaving the Secretary General’s mouth, the bros and slackers use the hour-long ceremonies to take naps and text their new friends from committee.
Ryan Tarr
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