Let’s Talk About our Amazing MUN Team

IU’s Model UN team has been performing exceptionally well – here’s a little insight on what that means and what they’ve been doing to change the game!

 

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a university with such innovative, highly-ranked public affairs and international studies schools would also have an astounding Model United Nations team, but I’m going to brag about it anyway.

Seriously, these guys are no joke.  They’re good, like, REALLY good.  Not only are they number one in the Big 10, but they’re the top dog in the whole Midwest (You know, my freshman year we were king of the Big 10 in basketball too…but that’s a topic for a different blog).  On top of that, bestdelegate.com ranks them 12th in the United States.  Well, technically the list says 13th, but it includes McGill, which is in Canada, so…

If you’re not familiar with how Model United Nations (MUN) works, let me explain a little before I talk too much about IU’s performance and the awards they’ve gotten.  Each competing school has a team, and everyone on this team is called a delegate.  Sometimes schools are assigned just one country, but big schools like IU usually get more.  So, let’s say IU gets assigned the United States and North Korea.  Since it would be super weird if these two were buddy-buddy, awards are given to delegates on an individual basis for debating well and playing their parts realistically.  So, it would be in IU’s best interest if their delegates from the U.S. and North Korea didn’t play nice.

In descending order of points, the awards a delegate can get are: Best Delegate, Outstanding Delegate, Honorable Mention and Verbal Commendation.  At the end of the awards ceremony, each team tallies up their points, and whoever has the most wins!

So, now that you’re a MUN expert, let’s talk about how our Hoosiers did.  Curious myself, I asked the team’s vice president and secretary-general, Andrew Greco.

“The team first attended BarMUN in Boston winning 6 awards, it then traveled to NCSC in Washington D.C. securing 8 awards, and it finished off the semester at UPMUNC in Philadephia bringing home 4 awards. This semester performance was the best in the team’s history and was enough to make it the 13th best collegiate Model UN team in North America,” he said.

When I asked him what he thought contributed the most to the team’s performance, he replied, “This year we heavily focused on education and bringing new members to conferences, which resulted in our success.  Our members felt more prepared to compete and we gained some very talented individuals over the past year.”

So, you heard it here first.  Under its terrific leadership, IU’s MUN team is finally taking its rightful place as a top-tier competitor.  They’ve done phenomenally well for themselves,  I have no doubt they’ll continue their success this semester, and They’ve already been given the honor to host Indiana’s high school conference a couple weekends ago.  Stay tuned for their upcoming performances in Charlottesville and Chicago this spring!