Training for MUN so far has been going really well. I was moved up to the Intermediate 2 training group for Season 2, which I was really happy about because that means my hard work and dedication was paying off. We have been exploring different styles of debate, one of them being UN4MUN which is less formal than the procedures followed during conferences. We also looked at what entails being a witness and a judge in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and did a few mock debates in small groups. Training in intermediate 2 is quite different from intermediate 1 as our focus is now on building our skills and confidence in coming up with speeches on the spot. In intermediate 1, we usually had a lot more time to prepare and we focused mainly on the conferences. I feel that intermediate 2 is a lot more beneficial in learning about world issues and becoming more comfortable with debate.
The next conference I attended was the MUN4Change at AIS. This was set up slightly differently, as the beneficiary organisation was the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). For this conference, I was assigned to the country of Tunisia in the Special Political Committee. This was a particularly challenging assignment as Tunisia is a very small place, and I didn’t know much about it; SpecPol is also one of the six main committees of the UN General Assembly.
The main challenge during this conference was that I got the chance to be the main submitter for my group’s resolution. The main submitter has to make a speech at the start introducing the resolution, as well as create friendly amendments and participate a lot. I think it was a really good learning experience because it definitely built upon my skills as a debater in MUN and helped me improve. Not only from the topic itself, but from the people and other debaters as well, I learnt a lot about how to do well in MUN and to write and deliver a convincing resolution.
