A weekend at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, Mass. An opportunity to meet students from all around the world. And a chance to have the United Nations consider your ideas for future use. From Feb. 17-20, a group of approximately twenty-one Eastern students traveled together to Boston with the hopes of being successful at the Harvard Model United Nations.
Every year, students at the collegiate level from around the world come together and meet for a long weekend at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston. Each group of students takes on the role of representatives from a different country. Their overall goal is to have resolutions to different international issues passed by various committees and eventually have the real United Nations look at them.
Every county in the world is represented by a different group of students who have “applied” for the country they wish to represent. Once each school is assigned a country, research must be done in order to understand their country. Students must understand how that specific country’s government works, how the country is run and other essential information to make the rest of the model U.N. participants believe they are from that country.
This year, Eastern students were assigned to Senegal, a small French-speaking, West African, Islamic country. Once each country was established, each group was then split up into various committees, which focused on different international issues. These include ways to deal with international organized crimes, international finances, human rights and economic development, among many other topics.
First-year Max Holland, a Political Science major interested in international issues, commented on the experience. “I like to think (that) if we come together, we can come up with a solution to benefit the world,” Holland said. “It is really interesting to see how different it would be to stop things such as sex trade. It (the experience as a whole) definitely makes your world a little smaller.”
The Model U.N. group on our campus meets two or three times a week during the fall semester, but once they are assigned their country for the year, the meetings become more frequent. Members commit to the group in the fall when they pay the fees for the weekend in Boston.
The group also has an optional one-credit possibility for those interested in the political sciences or who need an extra credit.