Ian Fairchild:
The first flight to Nashville was my first ever experience on a plane and I thought it was lots of fun. Then we got on the flight to Boston and I remember seeing how beautiful the city was from above. It was a sight I could never forget!
As soon as we arrived, Mrs. Parker, XMUN advisor, and I attended a brief meeting on how the conference will proceed along with answers to questions we may have. After that, I attended my first committee session along with about 70 other delegates. It started a little awkward but we continued to discuss the topic of my committee which was the implementation of solar geoengineering. After the first session, our group debriefed on our first committee and went to bed right considering it was a very long day for us.
The next day I woke up and had an amazing breakfast provided by the Sheraton Hotel. Later the group went on an exploration to Harvard and traveled around Boston via public transit such as subway and bus. When I went back we had two committee sessions where we started writing our working papers. My paper included providing education, research, and resources to help fight climate change with solar geoengineering. My bloc merged with another bloc and we created a draft resolution. There was an opposing draft resolution and we later voted on which ones to pass. My bloc’s resolution did pass and the opposing resolution did not pass.
Despite all the work and sitting through the debate, we did have lots of fun on Saturday, January 27th. It was my birthday, and as a group, we went bowling and had dinner. To conclude, it was lots of fun, and I would do it again if I had the chance.
Rubi Aguilar & Danny Lin:
For the specialized decolonization committee, delegates had to find a compromise on the Western Sahara Conflict. While we had hours of debate and seven working papers, the delegates attending the conference got down to four draft resolutions through long negotiations. From this, there was one solution that was passed in the end, granting Western Sahara complete independence.
Matt Kindred:
Being a part of the Special Summit on Terrorism, I was expecting a large committee like my fellow delegates from Xenia, but was stunned when I heard that at maximum, we would have 14 people in attendance. Not only was this a massive shock, it was rare, seeing that this was the size of something like a security council, instead of the General Assembly it was tagged under.
Starting faster than any other GA, my committee quickly got separated into 3 blocs, each focusing on an issue we all felt was pressing about the topic, but all ultimately agreeing with one another. My focus was on the social media propaganda of violent extremists and terrorists(VE/T) and focusing on reducing the overall spread of terrorists through apps like X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and more. The other blocs focused on general education around the areas of Africa and the Middle East, and border security to prevent the spreading of VE/T to nations. While every part of the committee was in agreement that all these issues needed to be addressed, my bloc was ultimately sidelined as the rest of the committee decided that social media wasn’t an actually pressing issue. As is customary, the person above our chairs visited and talked with our committee, expecting backlash, but instead got a lot of praise. They’d eventually offer up that we become a pseudo-crisis committee, in which at some point we would eventually get an event that happens that we have to respond to. With the exception of one, the rest were in agreement that we wanted that.
The next day, we got a crisis update about some Harvard MUN students being kidnapped by terrorists and taken to the Kazakh mountains. Our committee spent an entire session and a half drafting directives to pass that deal with this issue, before continuing on and voting on our resolutions for the primary topic. This eventually wrapped up the sessions, leading to just fun games of Mr. White or general icebreakers.