PHILADELPHIA – From January 26th to January 30th members of North Penn’s Model United Nations club took part in the Ilmunc, Ivy League Model UN conference, hosted by Penn at the Sherrington across the Parkway in downtown Philadelphia.
Model UN club discusses global issues and international relations. Once a year members travel to the conference which replicates a United Nations meeting. Club members are assigned to a country and sit on committees representing their nation and discuss different topics, all of which are current United Nations issues. “Most of the work involves researching your country’s stance on certain global issues and writing a paper on it. Many people started researching right when we got our country assignments, which was about two weeks before the conference,” said Model UN club president, Meghana Deshmane. Students present their nations position on the topic at hand and work together to produce working papers, basically a draft for a resolution. Once the working papers are completed students work to create a formal resolution to the committees issue.
This year North Penn presented Moldova, a small Eastern European country, and Venezuela, one of the larger South American nations bordering the Atlantic.
Members of Moldova sat on the SPECPOL committee, which centered its self on special political issues and decolonization. The topics they debated consisted of the Arab Spring, the Middle Eastern democracy movements, and peaceful space exploration.
Senior, Maria Poccia said “With our country (Maladova) we couldn’t really put in our opinion because we didn’t have the money to give to the cause and our allies did not participate as much as the big countries.”
Members of Venezuela found their debates a little easier because that nation has more power; however, they faced another challenge.
“We got to debate for the point of view of a country that doesn’t share western values,” said Deshmane.
Along with the countries committees were crisis committees. Only one member of North Penn’s Model UN, Katie Blocklove, took part in one of the six of these committees. She participated in the Titians of Industry committee representing the company Woolsworths. Though these committees had the same general purpose of the others, attempting to from resolutions, they were a tad more intense. Members were woken up at 1 in the morning and had to discuss how to fix a crisis that was occurring.
While North Penn did represent the most influential or powerful nations and overall did not play a huge role in the conference, students still enjoyed their time in Philadelphia and furthered their knowledge of world affairs.