Cerritos has a large class program and has enough delegates to attend conferences on consecutive weekends. They won delegation awards at both Nationals NHSMUN and Berkeley BMUN in 2011 and will be sending teams to both conferences on the same weekend in 2012.
Model UN is decentralized and has grown autonomously around the world. This has led to big differences in how Model UN is done. We already explored the key differences between the “World Division” and the “National Division” at the college level and the key differences between THIMUN-affiliated MUN and North American MUN at the high school level. But even within the North American high school level, there seems to be significant differences between how Model UN is done on the West Coast compared to the East Coast.
West Coast teams have historically traveled East starting with Huntington Beach’s victory at Harvard in 1973, and teams like Edison and Mira Costa have been successful at East Coast conferences like Harvard and Georgetown since 1980s and 1990s. Since the 2000s, many more teams from the West Coast have traveled to East Coast conferences every year, but it doesn’t happen often the other way around and it seems like teams from the East Coast and beyond are still relatively unfamiliar with West Coast MUN. West Coast schools shined at Georgetown NAIMUN in 2010 with Mira Costa winning Best Large and Cerritos winning Best Small, and the conversation has been building up (due, in part, to the creation of this website and its rankings) to Mira Costa’s return to NAIMUN this year, which illustrated to teams on both coasts what some of those differences are.
What are the key differences between Model UN in the West Coast and how it’s done elsewhere, particularly the East Coast? More importantly, is there something that other regions can learn from West Coast Model UN?
