The Model United Nations club attended its first conference of the year at Stanford’s annual fall conference from Nov. 13 to 15, and won several prestigious awards. Eighteen members from Redwood attended the Stanford conference, where there were about 600 delegates overall.
Senior Zac Patel, president of the Model UN club, won a Best Delegate award, which is a first place award given to the best speaker of each committee. No Redwood Model UN club member had won a best delegate award since 2012.
Seniors Stevie Becker, Jason Seavey, and Gavin Wong won honorable mentions. Senior Matt Moser won a verbal commendation.
According to the Model United Nations website, all awards are given based on participation in committee, remaining in character, and proper obeying the rules and procedures.
“I can definitely tell that we as a club are getting better, and it almost is starting to feel like we’re a team, rather than just a club that brings people to conferences casually,” said Becker, the club’s vice president.
At the conference, members of the club were split up among different committees where they debated issues about the countries they represented. Each committee followed a strict procedural format that resembles how real United Nations meetings work.
Prior to the conference, club members from each high school were assigned countries and specific influential people to represent. Each student had to do research on their assignment in advance in order to know their topic well at the conference, according to Patel.
The aim of the conferences is to get students debating and discussing these issues around the world, Patel said.
Each conference has a few different types of committees into which the students are divided.
The goal for a General Assembly committee, one type of committee, is to create a resolution by the end of the conference. A resolution is a solution to the issues the committee has been discussing.
Crisis Committees, another type of committee, make many different resolutions that deal with several ongoing issues. Becker participated in a Crisis Committee.
“It was more fast paced, so there wasn’t just one big resolution at the end. There were a bunch of directives that were passed throughout, which dealt with continuously appearing crises, rather than just having a stagnant environment where you discuss the issue, debate the issue, and then write a resolution,” Becker said.
Judging by the success of this conference, Becker said that he thinks the club will keep improving and becoming more competitive.
“I think we’ll go for more awards and it will be really interesting to see how the club develops from now on, now that we’re starting to get more competitive,” Becker said.
The Model UN club also hosted its own conference at Redwood on Oct. 17. The leaders of the club ran the conference, and were tasked with planning the committees and having an administrative team to make sure all of the events ran smoothly, according to Becker.
The Model UN club meets on Wednesdays in Room 263.
