Formality & Diplomacy
Hey loves!
From Sunday to Tuesday, some of my peers and I attended HKMUN 2018. HKMUN is Hong Kong's biggest Model United Nations (MUN) conference. It was my first time attending the conference and I was stunned to see so many MUN students participate in one conference.
We attended HKMUN just one week after we held our own conference, LPCMUN. Our conference was organised solely by the students from our MUN QC. As one of the leaders of the QC, I had put a lot of time into our conference and it was definitely worth it! Organising LPCMUN gave me an insight into what is going on behind the scenes of organising a conference and how much work goes into two days of MUN. I was truly impressed by the hard work that all the students put into our conference despite being so busy themselves. LPCMUN ran smoothly and we talked about many interesting topics that remain challenges for the UN today. Our committees discussed topics from the Israel-Palestine Conflict to Catalonia's claims of independence. Many of our students got to chair a committee for the first time and they did an incredible job. (A chair is a leader of a MUN committee.)
I got be a chair myself at HKMUN this year. It was my first time chairing at an official conference and it was pretty amazing to chair a big committee in such a professional setting. HKMUN had over 400 delegates attending and I chaired NATO. It was very interesting to chair NATO since NATO endorsed decision-making by consensus which means that all delegations have to vote in favour for it to pass. This made passing a resolution much harder in the committee and we actually ended up passing only two resolutions despite having debated three topics and having written seven resolution drafts.
Quite a few of my peers were involved in the organisation of HKMUN and I am glad to see how their efforts paid off. As a chair of HKMUN, I also got a little insight into how much preparation is needed for bigger MUN conferences and I was truly impressed to see that the entire conference is run by students. Things like booking buses to pick up delegates or organising adapters for the many committees of the conference were all on the to-do lists of the board members.
The two conferences have reminded me of why I love doing MUN. Whenever you sit in a committee and listen to the delegates give their opening speeches where they give an overview of their stances, all stances seem very different and it seems almost impossible to imagine them compromising with one another. But I found that the best delegates are the ones that compromise and that find common ground where there seems to be none. MUN is proof that we can find a way to compromise if we look hard enough for it and if all sides are committed to finding that common ground.
On another note, I would like to thank the people who contacted me about their UWC interviews and applications. It is very interesting for me to hear about the selection process in different countries through you guys. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about my UWC experience or the application!
Lots of Love,
Elena
