The phone rings in the wee hours of the morning, rousing the boys in room number 1532 at the Boston Marriot in Boston, MA who were sleeping soundly just a moment ago. Antonio Sevilla, sophomore, groggily answers the phone and listens as he, along with Martin Llobell, also a sophomore, is instructed to hurry up, go downstairs, and get to the meeting room ASAP; there’s an emergency NASA/Soviet Program meeting and they have to get there. Now.

Sevilla and Llobell, along with the rest of Gables’ own Model United Nations club, traveled to Boston on February 8th, 2007 to attend BosMUN, one of the biggest Model UN conferences held in the US every year. It is hosted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston University (BU). Along with ice skating (on a real pond!), riding the T, Massachusetts’s amazing transportation subway, and finally seeing Harvard University up close and personal, 28 Coral Gables students dressed up in business attire and heels (without forgetting the jackets and scarves; Miami kids don’t do well in 20 degree weather, not counting windchill) to discuss foreign policies and international happenings with other high school students from all over the country.

Okay, so what do you think when you hear the words “Model United Nations?” No, nothing? Are you scratching your head as you read this going “Model United what?” Or maybe you automatically think of nerds in suits whose sole purpose in life is to free the world of injustice and…bad stuff. But in reality, Model UN is so much more than that.

Model UN is an organization where high school students, as well as college students, reenact real committees in the real United Nations. The participants will then be given a country and a topic, transforming them into pretend delegates of that country. Usually, in big conventions, there is one student per country per committee.

There are many committees to choose from. There is the General Assembly, which contains the main committees that every conference has. These usually include the Disarmament and International Security (DISEC); Social, Humanitarian and Cultural (SOCHUM); and Special Political and Decolonization Committee (SPECPOL). Then there are the Economic and Social committees that deal with everything from narcotic drugs to human rights. The specialized committees are the ones that deal with specialized nations or groups, like the European Union, the Summit of Americas and the World Health Organization. There are also the crisis committees, where instead of the delegates representing a nation, they act as an actual person in the real UN committee. These include the BosMUN King’s Privy Council where the delegates act like it was 1679 and even managed to execute someone (the delegate had to come back as someone else) in the this year’s conference.

Usually the high school committees are headed by MUN college students so even though it’s a professional atmosphere, there is also the element of “hey, the chairs aren’t much older than me; they are people too.”

“I like it because I get to interact with students from other schools and talk about things that actually matter,” Jackie Campusano, junior, said.

Okay, so now that the reader knows what MUN is all about, I’ll commence on how it works. First, the student is assigned a country and given a deadline to write their position paper. This basically outlines what they are going to talk about, their country’s position on the topic and what they (as the country) plan to do to resolve it or alleviate it. It is not a big deal, but it should be taken seriously since a delegate really does not want to go into a huge conference room with no idea what they are going to talk about. After that, the delegate attends the actual conference where there will be sessions where the topic is discussed and possible resolutions are written by different countries working together. Draft papers become draft resolutions that are then voted on. If passed, the draft papers will become resolutions and thus the crisis will “officially” have a resolution.

In each committee, the delegates will be given one to two topics which will be researched and investigated for a possible solution. Students end up learning everything about their countries, from the country’s history to the country’s economic state to its allies and enemies to the name of the president’s first born child. Since everything is so interconnected, the participant’s knowledge of the country and of the region in general will expand exponentially. All of this information needs to be researched beforehand and it is the delegate’s responsibility to know what he/she is talking about and have an accurate portrayal of the country he/she is pretending to represent.

The delegates are no longer high school students, they are now delegates of The Republic of Congo or the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and thus have to take the country’s position in whatever topic they are working on. This means that if X delegate ends up being France in a committee where the main topic is disarmament and the main issue is war, they won’t be the one pushing for atomic warfare, for example.

Delegates will not always be stuck being the same country in the same committee. Each conference will give participants a new country, a new topic and a new perspective towards the global community.

Many think it is every interesting being with hundreds of countries, many of these countries most do not even know exist. (It’s all right; do not be embarrassed, I did not know Tuvalu was a country either.) Students learn how countries settle disputes politically and get exposed to different cultures and to different socioeconomic standards of living.

Besides the learning experience, students also get to meet different high school students from all over world. MUN can be perceived as a great opportunity to meet people who have the same interests and who can carry intellectual conversations about the state of Iran or the economic state of Mali. Most of the MUN-ers that I’ve met have a grasp on social, economical and political issues and there is nothing wrong with some global discussion during lunch.

The common misconception about kids who partake in Model UN is that they are nerds, and yes, I did just mention how they know what is going on, but trust me, we are just like every other high school student out there. At the end of the sessions we joke around and tell MUN ‘pick up lines’, many that have to do with Djibouti.

All in all, it’s a really neat experience that not only opens up your eyes to everything that is going on globally and helps hormone-enraged teenagers meet cute boys (or girls, what ever floats their boat). Most importantly, it makes participants more aware in general. We could all use some more of that.