The following recap was provided with the help of Matt Brown (Secretary UNA- Sheffield) and Alex Whitaker PR and Campaigns Officer for UNA at Sheffield.
Honorable Delegates at SheffMUN 2012 Simulation
UNA Sheffield are delighted to announce that the first SheffMUN conference was held on the 10th and 11th of November, in Bartolomé House,the University of Sheffield’s prestigious and established Law School. The conference was a great success and was attended by a broad range of home and abroad students, creating an atmosphere of both diversity and camaraderie. This was also helped by the smooth layout of the conference in which all four committee rooms were linked by a main common room that made for natural, flowing debate whether members of the same committee and others during breaks.
The conference was also successful in bringing together delegates of different ages, experience levels, and familiarity with the processes of the United Nations. Whilst some delegates had years of experience as both delegates and chairs at MUN conferences, many others were very much beginners who were attending their first conference. However, despite this, the level of debate was excellent, and we hope that much of this can be attributed to the MUN workshops that Sheffield UNA holds every Wednesday. The debate chairs were particularly impressed with the performance of many of the less experienced delegates, and commented on the depth and breadth of the knowledge these delegates possessed regarding their representative countries. The quality of the chairing itself was also excellent, with one of the DISEC chairs being Dr Ross Bellaby, a lecturer in the department of politics, with whom we have strong and enduring links.
Thus, our objective to create a small, specialist, high quality conference to bridge the gap between our training workshops and a full scale conference was highly successful. For such a small secretariat to produce such a full scale conference was highly admirable, indeed, Best Delegate Tahmid Chowdury remarked
‘Very impressive to see what can be achieved by a hard working committee, just as good as many of the established conferences I have attended – the debating was just as good too’.
Although the society has grown from strength to strength, UNA is committed to further growth and improvement. We consider SheffMUN to be an integral part of this growth and expect the conference to grow in 2013 to include both outside delegates and hopefully even foreign delegations.
