Representing my school at a MUN Conference at the Hague in the Netherlands, was one of the best experiences I have had so far this year and definitely the best way to mark the end of my MUN career. It is almost fitting in a way that the final conference I attend is of this scale and size. I had initially joined MUN as a way of overcoming my fear of public speaking. I still remember how even a small 40 member committee used to intimidate me, I would come prepared with a short speech, find a way to deliver that sometime throughout the conference and call it quits if I didn’t get the chance I would blame it on not getting recognised. I had obviously come far from that, raising my placard at every single opportunity I got just to get recognised and share with the entire committee what my thoughts were, while I had certainly gotten over my fear of speaking in front of people, another issue still persisted: I was still bad at improvising speeches. This MUN conference, however, gave me the opportunity to shine that imperfection as well. Somehow delivering a speech in front of a room with 100+ people didn’t intimidate me anymore, if anything it gave me confidence. It allowed me to realise that what I was saying as I made it up along the way, was actually good, and that reassurance allowed me to keep going with my speech. Looking at their faces, I could see people nodding along, showing agreement to my points while others taking notes, just waiting to attack whatever I had just said. Similarly, trying to convince people to vote in favour of a resolution that you had written in a committee of this size and then seeing it actually get passed, was also a very rewarding process. Another way in which I found THIMUN to be different was that it had participants from all over the world who held different perspectives about democracy and was a very different experience from the singular liberal perspective that dominates MUN conferences in Singapore. These different perspectives on cliched global issues made the conference that much more rewarding.

My Speech on the Resolution