Posted: May 13, 2015 | Written by Jeianne Baniqued
The Riverside City College Model United Nations team returned from the 2015 National Model United Nations New York Conference with six awards in tow, recognizing their countless hours in team preparation.
With many other MUN teams from various colleges throughout the nation in attendance at the conference held March 29-April 2, the RCC team representing the country of Andorra, competed hard to receive the conference’s highest honor, the Outstanding Delegation award.
It is the second year in a row that RCC’s MUN received this award.
In addition, RCC MUN won outstanding position paper awards in four committees: General Assembly First Committee, General Assembly Second Committee, United Nations Environment Programme (sic.), and Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference.
The head delegate of the team, Argie Hill, who presented in the UNEP committee, was also given the Outstanding Delegate award honoring his admirable cooperation and follow-through in the policy and character of his assigned member state.
Voted by members of his team to receive such an honor, Hill took pride in the teamwork they had all demonstrated.
“We won most of the awards available and I am proud to say that everyone accomplished their personal goals,” Hill said.
Other members of the team who had attended the five-day conference in the Big Apple were Cristian Alejandre, Verity Bowler, Matthew Craig, Andrea Fleming, Zara Khan, Mahnoor Rahmen and Kevin Rivas.
In order to finalize which delegates are selected to attend a big conference such as the one in New York, students must finish all their research with a minimum of 50 articles regarding the country they are representing, must have completed all assigned work and demonstrate exceptional public-speaking and delegate skills.
The objective for students in MUN is to enhance their skills in public speaking, researching, and writing.
“Extensive research is critical, especially when it comes it comes to position papers for conferences,” said RCC MUN delegate Adam Molina.
Many conferences require that each delegation submit a position paper – an essay detailing their country’s policies on the topics being discussed in your committee.
Writing a position paper helps organize the delegate’s ideas in able for them to share their prospective country’s position with the rest of the committee they’re presenting in.
The purpose of the position papers sent in by the students is to demonstrate their own knowledge of the country and its position with the topic.
During the conferences, the goal is to create a paper that calls for action on a said subject and ways to improve or fix the issue.
Student representatives of each country are allowed to make a speech to persuade all countries to their idea of solving the problem.
During informal sessions, students get into groups of countries that follow similar ideals and write the position paper.
Matthew Craig, a delegate representative who served in the winning General Assembly committee for his position paper at the conference, felt quite spent when dealing with other delegates from opposing countries.
“Through the darkness of dealing with the Italian delegation who was opposed to our working paper, the negative events were overshadowed by my partner and I’s ability to handle these types of situations,” Craig said.
It was through MUN’s hard work and dedication that they were so successful.
“The events that truly made the trip special were seeing the culmination of all our training bring itself to light as we handled every problem sent to us with confidence and pride while everyone came out ahead. We wrote the best, we negotiated the best, and we had fun while doing it,” Craig said.
