The Model United Nations project was a project that helped students get a better understanding of the current world issues we face and also learn about what steps we are taking to solve them. During this project, all students were assigned countries that they would represent during the Model U.N conferences. I was assigned India and learned a lot about the hardships citizens face while being in a developing, second most populated country in the world. Our classes focused on two different global issues which included the refugee crisis, and climate change. During these projects, we would use the time to research our countries perspective and what solutions our citizens would be full in support of. After this, we worked to write refined policy papers about what the issue is, our country's beliefs and how it is affecting citizens, and then one to three possible solutions we could see the world agreeing to. Finally, we wrote very professional resolution papers which included preambulatory clauses (what the issue is) and operative clauses (What solutions do we think could work). During our conference, we selected two resolutions to be on the docket and throughout the night made amendments that would better the operatives being proposed. We then voted on the resolutions amended and came to a conclusion about what solutions would be implemented around the world.
Some skills I sharpened during this project were my perseverance and effective writing skills. In the Model United Nations project, we had to write very technical and refined resolutions and policy papers. This can be evident in my proudest part of the project which was my climate change resolution paper. I am proud of this because I spent a lot of time working on coming up with reasonable and achievable resolutions for the world to follow. For the first conference, I was having a lot of trouble in the refugee crisis model United Nations and writing resolutions for my very complicated stance of being India, I was lost in what I should write about and what resolutions would be reasonable for my country’s beliefs. During the climate change section of the United Nations, I had a much better understanding of the requirements of the resolutions we were creating and I spent a lot longer time working towards operatives that could be implemented around the world. If I were to go back and do an aspect of this project differently, I would make sure to learn a lot more about the refugee crisis before diving into country research. I noticed that I had some holes in my overall perspective on what was happening and what initiatives have already been done to combat the crisis. If I were to go back and learn more about the overall crisis, my resolutions and policy paper could have been so much more refined. Although this was challenging to me, I did a good job with figuring out piece by piece of the complicated perspective the country I was representing had, but I would have liked to go further in depth with that research. Another challenge I had during this project was learning parliamentary procedure during our MUN conferences. This was very hard because in the United Nations you can not really use personal pronouns and have to learn what motion or point go with the statements you want to make. The whole set up of the conference was something that I have never seen before. Having moderated caucuses and then roll call votes got especially confusing the first few times practicing. I overcame this challenge by participating fully in practice rounds and going over the practice sheets with the motions and points to move the meeting along. I gained my confidence in using parliamentary procedure towards our final exhibition and were making motions and speaking during the event.
My perspective changed a lot about the global issues during this MUN project. I learned a lot about how people from all over the world come together to solve current world problems. Before this project, I didn’t really know a lot about how the world came up with solutions to better our world, but learning about the United Nations and about current projects being implemented to help combat climate change was very inspiring to me. I didn’t know a lot about the different groups within the United Nations or anything as well. I enjoyed learning about what was happening in our world in hopes to help solve our issues. The most enduring understanding of the world I will take away from this project is that we can work through the issues we have in our world. When countries come together to not only create a holistic perspective about what needs to be done but working towards reasonable and positive solutions our world can truly resolve the problems we face. In order to create solutions, all representatives need to have space to express their countries needs and beliefs in the issues in the world. I found this project very inspiring because it showed us how theses problems are solved and how the world can come together in unity to focus on a safer, cleaner tomorrow for everyone.