Last week, I was lucky enough to be in China for a Model United Nations conference. What is Model United Nations? Model United Nations, or MUN, is a simulation where participants in a conference are given a country and debate world issues, very much like the modern United Nations today. There are numerous of them available in Calgary, including SWCHSMUN (Sir Winston Churchill High School’s Model UN) and UCMUN (University of Calgary’s Model UN), which attract students from all throughout Calgary and the surrounding region, all of whom come together and debate world issues. If you’d like to see more about the recent UCMUN, I highly recommend reading Alice’s blog about that conference. 
The great part about these MUNs is that they cater to people interested in the United Nations, but also in certain issues, allowing everyone interested to move closer into their interests and meet people with similar focuses and likes in terms of topics for debate. In UCMUN, the committees focused on a broad range of topics, including human rights, militarization of countries, and my personal favourite, the future of economies and sustainable economic growth.
After doing both of these MUNs this year, I decided I wanted to continue my experience, and began looking for another conference to attend. Though there were none in Calgary, my MUN director suggested that we attend BEIMUN – an international conference of over 900 students based in Beijing. This conference was three days long, and had students from Norway to Qatar to Japan attending. If you’re interested in how that conference went, you can read the newspaper from the conference, BEIWATCH, on their website.
Though MUN isn’t an activity that has broad participation in North America, around the world there are a great many conferences – and nearly all of them are in English. Attending an international conference allows one to gain experience in MUNs while also meeting people with different viewpoints, brought up from their experiences living in different locales.
Even if you don’t want to travel, or can’t, attending MUNs in Calgary is one of the greatest choices you can make. The experience you gain from debating issues in a large group is useful in your future, no matter what field you go in, as you quickly learn compromise and agreement in order to help get things done. Your speaking skills also get a lot of practice, and you also have to learn about current events – all the main contributors to conferences I have attended know about what is going on in the world, and how the issues we are debating, whether they are nuclear non-proliferation, the situation in the Middle East, or solving debt crises, relate to and are affected by current events. Overall, attending MUN is a great experience, and even if you don’t have much time to prepare, just discussing these issues with other like-minded students can help you develop your own stances on issues and help you see how you can fix the issues plaguing the world today.