11 members of Huntley’s Model UN join over 420 students from nine other schools at Carthage College, WI to participate in the first Model UN conference of 2018.

The event lasted all day from 7:45 a.m. to 3 p.m. HHS achieved great success in their first conference of the year with close to all members of the members obtaining individual awards for their performances.

Before the event, every student was given a delegation or a country which they had to represent in the conference. Students then wrote and positioned their paper according to the point of view their country would have on the given topic; all papers were to be submitted before the actual conference took place where they were to be critiqued by the judges.

There were two different types of confidences at the conference. The General Assembly and the Security Council. Each conference discussed various topics. The General Assembly discussed religious intolerance and privacy in the digital age while the Security Council discussed the Yemen conflict and the crisis in Venezuela. There are multiple General Assemblies and Security Councils all operating independently.

In the General Assembly, students are given caucus time to discuss solutions and form groups that propose solutions to be voted on. Then students begin giving speeches based there their own country’s policy. Students in the General Assembly had to prepare two speeches for each topic: a general speech and a position speech. Students would then vote on a policy and if that policy were to win through a majority vote, than the policy is implemented. It was not likely a General Assembly would come to a consensus on its first topic.

“Our assembly went over policies that the UN can implement to help countries deal with the problem at hand and reduce it… Our assembly made two groups, one group was about educating people on religion. And the other group was about stopping people after a violent attack,” sophomore Saarav Desai said. “Because I was Serbia, I spoke about examples of religious intolerance in my county, resolution we have passed to solve it… We didn’t actually come to a conclusion. We ended up in disagreement.”

At the end of the conference, awards were given out for the best position paper on each topic and the best delegates in the conference. Senior Harini Marchdai’s position paper was ranked third best, and she was ranked the third best delegate in the Security Council.

“I found the collaboration aspect of it really fun. Like, we all kind of got to work together and like think of our own ideas and modifying each other’s ideas,” Marchdai said. ”Like, we can compromise on this and that would fix this problem like that. I am also interested in politics and world news in general so getting to express that was really fun as well.”

Huntley chose to attend this event because it was a training conference and focused more on the educational aspects of Model UN. This UN conference was less focused on the formalities of a regular conference and instead focused on providing a participatory educational experience for all the students.

Huntley students say they felt nervous going in at first, but as the conference continued, they relaxed. They said they enjoyed the conference and felt confident in how they did. Huntley says they feel prepared for future conferences and hope to attend more competitive conferences in the future. They highly encourage other Huntley students to enter their club.