Model UN Group Wins | Graphic by Abigail Abbott | The Wright State Guardian
Wright State University’s Model United Nations team won high honors in their competition in New York. Current members are excited to see what the future holds for the team moving forward.
What is Model UN?
Model UN is a student organization and class that acts as an actual UN would.
Jerryd Jones is a Model UN member and Political Science major.
“We follow very similar, if not the same, procedures as a real UN may,” Jones said. “It teaches us important things, like negotiation, that will really help in our careers.”
Members of Model UN usually meet during a specified class time and work on honing their skills. They then take these skills to competitions and conferences. For these events, every Model UN is given a country to represent. From there, the team works with that information to come up with solutions to certain global issues.
WSU’s Model UN team has won consistently over the past 40 years. This year, they received the highest honors at their recent competition in New York City, New York.
The competition
Representing Spain, the WSU team spoke on issues regarding several different topics that led them to the victory. The team won the Outstanding Delegation award, which is the highest honor in the competition. Eight individual students won separate honors as well.
Coen Lucas, an Economics major, was one of those students.
“I was awarded a Position Paper Award in my committee, which is an award given to individuals in their respective committees based on a paper written prior to the conference,” Lucas said. “I was in the Second General Assembly. My partner was Hanzade Aslan, and we tackled sustainable tourism and the eradication of rural poverty.”
Lucas explained the importance of the Position Paper Award he and his partner received, saying that the paper submitted before the event was a sound and well-thought-out paper.
“The paper is meant to convey viable solutions to the issues that your committee addresses. We did that effectively enough to win an award,” Lucas said.
Lucas and Aslan were two of eight other students who won awards that night. Both their advisors, Dr. Vaughn Shannon, Political Science professor and Master of Arts in International and Comparative Politics program director, and Dr. Liam Anderson, a Political Science professor, are very proud of their students for winning these high achievements.
“They all work extremely hard and are incredibly organized,” Anderson said. “We were working with a lot of first-year students this year, but we were thoroughly impressed with how they stepped up this year. We are excited to see what this means for next year.”
Model UN currently has no more events for the 2023-2024 academic year; however, if a student would like to join Model UN, there will be an application and interview process opening sometime in the fall of next year. Students of all majors are welcome to join.
