Model UN Already Going National

The Model United Nations club is off to a great start.

With their trip to Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. rapidly approaching the students are meeting every week to prepare for the event. They are eating, sleeping, and dreaming about the conference.

"We were at the conference looking for Italy and we saw a group of people tossing pizza pies in the air and I said ‘That's them!'," recalls David Plazek, the group's faculty advisor.

At their meetings the group of six students, Na Zhan, President, John Kennedy, Vice President, Emma Shattuck, Secretary, Casey Spear, Treasurer, Adam Norton, and Jianchuan Zheng (Jason) discuss the positions they will be taking as they represent the country of San Marino at this year's competition. They are looking at topics like immigration, humanitarian intervention and refugees, and nuclear power to name a few.

"The nuclear topic will be debatable [at the conference] because there's going to be countries that are going to want to continue to build nuclear facilities and not really be subject to international regulations," says Kennedy

He goes on to tell the group the rest of the details of his proposal.

Each member has written or co-written a proposal on the items they will be discussing at the conference and their proposed ways of handling those issues. These proposals were finalized and submitted yesterday and will be scored at the conference. The best proposal is awarded a prize. The next focus for the group will be working on their speeches related to their proposals and their strategies for the conference.

"[We] were thinking that San Marino is kind of a religious country, maybe we could make our speeches religious…like Obama always finishes his speeches with ‘God Bless America'," suggests Zhan.

The students are all very focused on their preparation for the conference. They are looking into local resources like professors Ben Luce and Janet Bennion for more background information on the subjects they are discussing. They are also detail oriented down to knowing which non-governmental organizations (NGO's) San Marino is affiliated with.

This devotion to putting forth the best proposals and speeches is most likely due to the reasons why these students joined the Model U.N. club to begin with. Everyone said that it was something that interested them and just about everyone in the group is planning to go into some sort of social science career, accepting Zheng, an EJA major who says "it will help broaden my views with EJA."

The club will be at the conference from February 16 thru the 19 and are looking forward to a win.