Written by Victoria Arutunian
What is Model United Nations?
Model United Nations, also known as Model UN or MUN, is an extra-curricular activity or academic Club in which students pose as country representatives to the United Nations and simulate UN committees where they find solutions to complex issues. Conferences are usually organized by high schools or colleges and at the end of most conferences, outstanding delegates in each committee are recognized and given various awards.
What MUN means to us…
At a school primarily focused on math, and various sciences it can be a challenge for students to express or branch out interest in other activities. MUN is a great way for us to do exactly that— it teaches us valuable skills that can be applied in the future, while also allowing us to have fun!
MAST@FIU won BEST SCHOOL for the second year in a row!
Here are many of the individual awards our excellent members won:
In the GA committee, Victoria Arutunian & Gabriel Conde earned an honorable mention.
In the ITU committee, Loukas Gonzalez & Armin Farshchi earned an award for best position paper.
In the ECLAC committee, Chloe Freitas & Sarah Galindo earned an award for best position paper, while Sebastian Kenny & Zachary Herman earned an honorable mention.
In the HRC committee, Ari Barbella & Priscilla Cevallos won an award for best delegation.
In the UNDP committee, Nikola Desnica & Suria Rimer won an award for best delegation, while Brian Peña & Angie Papayannis received an award for outstanding delegation.
Miami-Dade Model UN
This year was MAST@FIU’s third time attending the Miami-Dade College Model United Nations Conference and our second year of winning the best school at MDMUN. While our team’s win seemed effortless, there was a lot of hard work and preparation behind our success. The president of MUN Loukas Gonzalez, along with the rest of the MUN board, put in the most effort, spending meetings teaching new members proper procedure and holding mock conferences for them to become accustomed to the competition environment.
The week before the conference was the most stressful, members spent most of their time doing research, writing speeches and finding solutions unique to their countries’ policies and economic statuses all towards developing a plan that would help them win. During the conference, each delegation was faced with several challenges whether it was in giving speeches, working with others or getting their ideas across.
After all the hard work and time spent in each committee, it was finally time for the closing ceremony where awards would be given and our team took home yet another victory to add on to previous victories at MDMUN, American Heritage MUN, as well as the opportunity to attend Gator MUN at UF. As our school’s Model UN team continues to grow stronger, it is genuinely exciting to see where our next victories will lie and where we will have the opportunity to compete next, as well as leave behind our legacy for those who will pick up from where we left off. MUN is more than just research, stress and cooperation, it has become something more. Something grand that we all adore as one big successful family, and something we want to share with everyone else.