Excitement, fervor, and butterflies — those were the emotions running high in this past Saturday’s Cerritos High School Novice MUN Conference this past weekend, which had a record-breaking number of 800 delegates from 15 schools, including both high schools and middle schools.
The MUN program at Cerritos has grown in the past few years and this year, the hard work and dedication showed as the Cerritos Model United Nations Conference made its mark as a great training conferences for novice delegates in the Southern California MUN circuit.
The Co-Secretary Generals and Cerritos Secretariat begin to call the Cerritos Model UN Conference into session!
The Cerritos Model UN Program’s advisors and officers spent hours tirelessly working to produce one of the top novice training conferences for the Southern California MUN circuit. This year’s secretariat focused on improving different aspects of the conference:
1. Open Score and Tally System
Awards and scoring is a hot topic for Southern California MUN conferences, as chairs strive to ensure that all delegates receive the same number of opportunities to speak, comment, and participate in committee. The Cerritos Secretariat worked to address this issue by having a live, Google Docs account which would tally how many speeches and comments a delegate had in committee. This allowed advisors to see if the delegate was actively participating throughout the day and to point out any discrepancies that they had noticed.
2. Engagement of all Ages
In addition to high schools, Cerritos MUN was open to delegates from participating middle schools, such as Rancho Santa Margarita Intermediate School. Middle school delegates were able to compete against novice high school students and gain real experience with Model UN.
3. Focus on Model UN, Not Awards
Instead of giving tiered awards (Best Delegate, Outstanding, and Commendation / Honorable Mention), Cerritos MUN gave one level of award, the Excellence Award, to qualified delegates in order to reduce focus on awards. Advisors and delegates were still able to receive feedback and see how they performed according to their point sheets.
Overall, the Cerritos Model UN Conference took new approaches with Model UN and was able to successfully pull off a great training conference for novice delegates. Even though they were overwhelmed with the record-breaking amount of delegates that were signed up to attend the conference, as Co-Secretary-General Amanda Lee very eloquently stated, they were able to “keep it together and work together in order to make sure every point was addressed and covered.”
Below are photos of Cerritos MUN, filled with delegates caucusing and presenting resolutions! For more photos, please check out our album on the Best Delegate Facebook page.
The Delegates eager to begin committee!
A prepared Delegate representing the United States has a laminated outline of her country policy and solutions
The General Assembly Dias
The Fancy Cerritos Placards!
The UNESCO Dias with fellow BestDelgate reader, Dimple Chauhan!
Delegates all participate to give a comment
Delegates in the UNICEF Committee, present their resolution
The SPD Dias with their lovely poster
Delegates of the UNODC Committee present their resolution after hours of caucusing!
A large caucus group surrounds a row of desks as delegates participate in informal caucus
The Chair explains how to write and submit an Amendment to a resolution
The Ad Hoc Dias, wearing the Pink Ties in support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month!
Spain controls his caucus group and works to create effective solutions with his neighboring allies.
Mr. Ryan Villanueva modeling the new Best Delegate Pin
The Gorgeous, New, and Fierce Best Delegate Pin
The behind-the-scenes: Cerrito’s staff work to update the tally sheets and resolutions in real time
The Co-Secretary Generals, Amanda Lee and Neha Bijjala with one of their advisors, Jason Watanabe
After a long day of committee, the head chairs work to hand out awards during closing ceremony!
Ryan and I would like to thank the Cerritos Model UN Program for having us visit, and a special thank you to advisors Bill Mustard and Jason Watanabe. We’re already looking forward to next year’s conference!
