Clad in black suits and carrying briefcases, several hundred
high school students streamed into the John Wooden Center on Friday
for the opening ceremony of the 11th annual UCLA Model United
Nations Conference.
More than 900 high school students from 34 schools participated
in the MUN Conference, which lasted from Friday night to Sunday
afternoon. The conference was run by 65 UCLA undergraduates who
served as the secretariat that directed and moderated the
committees.
The conference consisted of simulated U.N. meetings in which the
students, whose schools each represented a country, debated
international issues and drew up mock resolutions.
The conference began Friday night with a keynote speech by
Donald Terpstra, UCLA’s diplomat in residence.
Terpstra gave an outline of U.S. diplomacy from the Cold War to
the war on terrorism, and described his vision of diplomacy as a
process of “educating others and ourselves.”
After Terpstra’s speech, students joined their respective
committees ““ which included groups such as the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, the U.N. Security Council and the World Health
Organization.
Debate topics ranged from “Security Council Reform”
and “U.N. peacekeeping reform” to “Human
Trafficking and Sex Tourism in Southeast Asia.”
On Saturday afternoon, the highly anticipated crisis-resolution
portion of the conference began.
The “crisis” consisted of a simulated international
emergency involving North Korea, al-Qaeda, China and nuclear
weapons, and was so complicated even some of the organizers were
confused.
The committees involved were informed about the events through
news updates, which the organizers had filmed.
The students then had emergency meetings to decide what action
to take in order to deal with the crisis.
“(Crisis-resolution) is one of the perks of the
MUN,” said Priscilla Chen, a fourth-year political science
student, and secretary general for the MUN, adding that the
impromptu crisis-resolution made the MUN more educational and
engaging.
The crisis-resolution part of the conference was met
enthusiastically by many students like Pavitra Pandoy, a junior at
Los Osos High School in Rancho Cucamonga.
“I am enjoying it a lot. It makes us feel like we are in
the real U.N.,” he said.