Ready for your college Model UN journey?
This guide is designed to provide an overview of the college Model UN landscape in the United States and Canada. Whether you’re a current college Model UN participant or a curious high school student, we hope this article helps you make the decisions that will shape the type of Model UN career you will want to experience. Before we get started, there are two important distinctions to note.
First, it is important to note that the North American college circuit is informally divided into two circuits. For simplicity, we named them the World Division and the National Division. The World Division is characterized by student-led teams that attend college-hosted conferences, see Model UN as more of an academic competition, and participate increasingly in crisis committees. Example conferences include HNMUN, UPMUNC, McMUN, ChoMUN, and NCSC. The National Division is characterized by faculty-led teams that attend organization-hosted conferences, see Model UN as more of an educational simulation, and participate in purely UN committees. Example conferences include NMUN, AMUN, SRMUN, MUNFW, and MMUN. Teams are free to attend any conference, but most teams stick with a particular circuit. Learn more about the circuits here.
Second, college Model UN can be much more than just participating on a travel team. In particular, college Model UN programs provide a different leadership experience by hosting collegiate, high school, and middle school conferences — some programs or students focus exclusively on staffing. A few programs also have relationships to staff at high school conferences hosted by independent organizations such as UNA-USA and WEMUN. Internally, college students can also take Model UN as a political science or international relations class, particularly if their team participates in the National Division, or have outreach, speakers, journals, and other academic or social activities as part of a club. Off campus, college students can also individually volunteer with non-profits that draw staff from multiple colleges such as the IMUNA-hosted high school conferences (NHSMUN, RHSMUN, SUSMUN) or many of the organization-hosted college conferences in the National Division.
We have divided college Model UN programs into six groups. The groups are ordered by how much impact a college Model UN program has on the external community based on their ability to host conferences for other schools at different academic levels and field top travel teams. Programs within each group are in alphabetical order and we noted if a program helps staff other conferences or has a class. We define ranked team in the World Division as any team that has ranked in Best Delegate’s World Division top 25 rankings at any point in the past two school years (2010-11 and 2011-12) and in the National Division as any team that has received an Outstanding Delegation at NMUN in the past two years (2011 and 2012). Note that the next tier of awards at NMUN is the Distinguished Delegation.
Please remember that everyone is looking for a different Model UN experience at the college level and that programs in a certain group may not be the best fit for an individual. On the same note, the prestige of a certain program is relative to one’s involvement in organizing conferences or participating in them. Please also note that programs evolve all the time — a program listed in one group may be in a different group by the time you graduate. With that said, here is the guide to college Model UN programs!
