Between Thursday and Sunday, the Johns Hopkins Model United Nations Conference (JHUMUNC) hosted a total of 1,680 high school students from all over the world at the Hilton Baltimore, making JHUMUNC XVII the largest conference in the history of the undergraduate organization.
Model United Nations (MUN) is an increasingly popular extracurricular activity for many high school students across the nation. Several universities play host to the largest conferences, where students simulate political organizations, roleplay as members of those organizations and engage in debate to resolve their simulated challenges.
As its name would suggest, the organizations most commonly simulated at MUN conferences are United Nations organs. Traditionally, students participating in MUN would role-play as the delegate of one country or another to bodies such as the UN Security Council or one of the many General Assembly committees.
However, the MUN community has since expanded its focus out from the UN and now includes events such as the more fast-paced ‘crisis’ simulations, in which students role-play the individual cabinet ministers of a government as opposed to the UN ambassador of a country.
Much like the broader activity of MUN, JHUMUNC grew up from humble origins. On the Wednesday prior to the conference, Secretary-General Kithmina Hewage discussed the development of JHUMUNC and his expectations for its 17th conference.
“JHUMUNC started 17 years ago. It was a small conference that was held in the Bloomberg building,” Hewage said. “We had around 50 or 60 students.”
He pinpointed 2011 as a key year of transformation for JHUMUNC, when the group changed its venue to the Renaissance Hotel by the Inner Harbor and gained greater national prestige as a conference.
“During my freshman year, the Secretaries-General did an immense registration drive; they invited almost all the high schools in the U.S.,” Hewage said. “After so many schools came in we established a good reputation.”
“We are in the top five largest conferences in the U.S.,” Hewage said. “We are ranked as one of the top-tier high school conferences by BestDelegate.com.”
In addition to overall attendance, Hewage stressed that other key features of the conference were the diversity and number of its simulations. Increasing the number of these committees alongside total attendance was aimed at both growing the participation of the high school students and improving their conference experience.
“Even though our total numbers have increased, our delegates-to-committee ratio has dropped since last year,” Hewage said.
The diversity of simulations run by JHUMUNC XVII was evidenced by the conference’s extensive committee list. The list included General Assemblies and other MUN staples, such as a simulation of an International Atomic Energy Agency meeting, albeit set 10 years in a hypothetical future. However, the conference also ran more elaborate and unorthodox simulations. Among these was the Quadrumvirate, a crisis simulation set in Feudal Japan comprised of four rival committees which wrestled one another for dominance of the islands.
Despite having moved from the Renaissance to the Hilton, Secretary-General Hewage stated that the JHUMUNC budget did not rely on external sponsorship.
“Our budget is mostly dependent on registration fees,” Hewage said. “We don’t get sponsorship from elsewhere.”
With 84 participating high schools and the lowest school registration fee at $60, plus the lowest additional fees of $60 per high school student, the attendance of JHUMUNC XVII would have given the organizers a theoretical minimum of $105,840 to work with. The actual budget was undoubtedly higher given that fees increased depending on how late schools registered for the conference.
Hewage expressed great confidence in the ability of JHUMUNC’s staff but nonetheless anticipated that some aspects of the conference would prove difficult.
“One of the biggest challenges given the size of the conference is security,” Hewage said. “1600 high schoolers itself is a daunting task.”
However, on the final day of JHUMUNC, Deputy Sergeant-at-Arms Jonathan Schlecht commented on the success of the conference’s security team.
“We had no security incidents,” Schlecht said, adding later that the only two noise complaints they received ended up having nothing to do with the participating high school students.
The ultimate responses of said students were positive across the board. Shashank Narayan, a student from Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, MD, had good things to say about his first time participating in MUN.
“It’s been a really good experience,” Narayan said. “Me and my friends had a pretty great time, we’ll probably talk about this for some time.”
The veteran participants also displayed a generally favorable attitude. Sami Berg, a student from East Brunswick High School in East Brunswick, N.J., had attended other conferences prior to JHUMUNC but nonetheless found the Hopkins conference to be fairly inspiring.
“I think it’s really cool,” Berg said. “After seeing the staff I would like to join the staff at a college MUN conference.”
For Timur Guler, a student from the Gilman School in Baltimore, Md., this year’s JHUMUNC marked his third consecutive participation in a conference hosted by the organization, yet his views on JHUMUNC as a conference were clear.
“I really liked this conference better than the other ones,” Guler said. “Everyone says that this one [JHUMUNC] is by far the better one.”
Not every review was a shining one however. Despite generally complimentary comments, Narayan mentioned that, as a first-time participant in MUN, he felt frustrated when those responsible for running his committee failed to stop novice delegates from being marginalized.
“The first couple of sessions were great. . .but then later what happened was around five experienced delegates got together and started doing everything themselves. A lot of us didn’t feel like we were in the loop,” Narayan said.
In addition to the high school students, the various Faculty Advisors (FAs) which chaperoned their respective students to the conference also commended the performance of the JHUMUNC staff. At the FA feedback session on Sunday, words of praise for the conference organizers dominated over suggestions for improvement. Ken Kubistek, the FA for Riverview High School in Oakmont, Pa., commented on the success of JHUMUNC XVII.
“I was worried about the size, but they were able to control and organize 2,000 students [high school students plus JHUMUNC staff] which was overly impressive,” Kubistek said. “I’ve been to smaller conferences of about 1,000 students and they were not nearly as well organized.”
All in all, JHUMUNC has raised the bar for its performance to new heights. The organization is cognizant of the situation and expressed a desire to consolidate its successes rather than expand its attendance.
“What we will focus on now is specializing in quality,” Hewage shit. “If we have more staff and recruitment, we can always increase the quality of the conference.”
