May 18
Two long years ago, while still a green and youthful college junior, I decided it would be a good idea to enlist myself in that glorious spectacle that Nick has likened to cattle droppings. ‘McMUN’, the annual McGill Model UN conference was a much hyped and anticipated event in the lives of many an IR major and the odd outsider like myself.
The lead-up to the three days of theatrics consisted of several ‘committee meetings’. As a veteran of MUN from high school, I knew fully well that they had a sole purpose: To offer the committee leaders an opportunity to bolster their egos with a silly sense of self-importance. They waxed eloquent about the worthiness of the Economist Intelligence Unit yet lacked even the most rudimentary knowledge of the issue at hand: Post-Soviet Nuclear Power Infrastructure. It was amusing.
To the contrary, the conference itself was a 72-hour immersion in every aspect of a hypothetical present-day Chernobyl. Corrupt finance ministers, KGB interrogations, nuclear fallout and mutated hamsters were just a few of the highlights. With the exception of the few waking hours of the evening that were spent by participants in drunken or otherwise compromising states, it was a learning experience second to none.
Now, as every transcultural wanderer knows, the firsthand overseas experience is so formative that most of us have difficulty even associating with the rest of the world because of it. But those are no grounds to dismiss MUN. Apart from being far more educative than ‘study abroad’ programs often spent in small and insular groups, it’s also way more fun.
Lastly, Nick makes one jarring error in his argument. Model UN conferences don’t attempt, by any means, to model themselves after the real thing. Rather, the idea has always been to create a model that reality itself should attempt to emulate.
Now, whether or not life imitates art is an entirely different question.
