On Saturday, Mar 23, Amador’s Model UN club attended the Bay Area Model UN Conference. This meeting is held once a year and features attendees from over a dozen schools.
After joining Model UN, students are given the chance to choose a country to represent. Students research current events and their relevance to the selected country.
“So we educate our students on what’s going on in the world right now and work together to find real solutions to real-world problems,” said Ziyan Liu, the former president of Model UN.
In preparation for the conference, students wrote research papers and long speeches to deliver. The issues discussed ranged from the South China Sea conflict to handling conflicts in the space age.
“Throughout the process, students give speeches, work together to write resolution papers, and learn public speaking and collaboration,” said Liu.
This year’s Model UN Conference was held at Sequoia High School in Redwood City. It was co-hosted by Amador and Sequoia Model UN clubs and was around 12 hours from start to finish.
The conference is a one-day event. At the opening ceremony, we introduce all the committees and there is a guest speaker. Then students go into committee sessions,” said Liu.
In these sessions, students took turns giving speeches and discussed possible solutions to modern-day issues. Delegates also won awards for giving the best speech, doing the most research, and other achievements.
Planning
The club started planning this event more than six months in advance.
“The planning took months and months. Around October we released our chair application, which is where people apply to be chairs and pick their committees. In total we have 11 committees and over 30 amazing chairs,” said Liu.
With around 400 attendees from more than a dozen schools, officers worked around the clock to ensure everything ran smoothly
“We had a lot of last-minute changes, so we had to learn to work with those changes and accommodate the changes. There was a lot of emailing involved because we had to send out assignments for all 400 students,” said Liu.
Not only was the conference a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for students, but it also raised more than $1,100 for charity.
“More than 400 people were there, which is a huge amount considering it’s a high school conference run by high schoolers for high schoolers. In fact, it’s the biggest high school conference in the Bay Area,” said Liu.
