Talk with MUN President, Maddie Hurwitz
Rebecca Kenney learns more about the President of the Model UN Club, OHS senior Maddie Hurwitz.
Pixel Journal: Can you tell me a bit about the Model UN club and your involvement in it?
Maddie Hurwitz: The Model UN club is one of OHS's many clubs. We meet approximately bimonthly, and during these meetings, we hold presentations about international issues, debate these issues from a country-perspective to simulate what goes on in the actual UN, and work on public speaking and debating skills.
I am the president of the club and have been for the past two years. I joined the club in 9th grade, hoping to improve my speaking skills and knowledge of international events, fell in love, and have been involved ever since!
PJ: The OHS Model UN club recently attended a conference at Johns Hopkins University, what was that experience like?
MH: In my personal opinion (I can't really speak for everyone although my impression is that it holds for the others), it was a lot of fun! Physical conference weekends are always pretty intense (committees meet in blocks of 3-4 hours at a time, sometimes late into the night and possibly twice a day) but we had a wonderfully cohesive team this year who really put their all into committee sessions. Furthermore, we were able to hang out outside of committee session at a team dinner and some of the social events put on by the Johns Hopkins kids, which was really enjoyable and allowed for a weekend of rewarding hard work and pleasure.
PJ: How much preparation goes into attending a conference of this size and intensity level? What were the biggest takeaways from that?
MH: There is a significant amount of preparation involved. Since January, we as a team have been meeting weekly (on top of typical MUN meetings) in order to go over aspects of MUN protocol and committee sessions that don't really come up in an online environment. In addition, each delegate was responsible for thoroughly researching the two topics set for their committee and writing two one-page each papers on the topic and proposed solutions for the issue.
PJ: Any memorable or standout experiences from the MUN conference?
MH: For me personally, it was my first time participating in a crisis committee, which is special because of the continual presentations of crises throughout the committee in order to force committee to react in real time and delegates to think on their feet. This made for a really engaging experience full of interesting (and amusing) stories. For example, the crisis committees have midnight crises, in which delegates are woken up at 1 am in the morning in order to deal with some issue that had come up in their committee. In my case, we were a committee of the British Royal Navy in the early 1700s, so the impetus for our midnight crisis was that the Dutch (another committee on the same floor) had poisoned our Queen. We had to then work together to pay our respects to the Queen (our chair, who was playing the Queen, was "dead" on a sofa and we one by one knelt to say goodbye) and get our revenge on the Dutch.
Another memorable crisis was when one delegate's "family" was murdered, which was later revealed to be orchestrated by another delegate.
PJ: OHS is a very unique school with its mixed online and ‘in person’ platform, are there any challenges and/or advantages of attending OHS for participants in the Model UN club?
MH: Of course one of the advantages to OHS for MUN delegates is that OHS has instilled certain research and preparation skills in most of us that not all delegates from other schools possess. However, we are very much a young Model UN team and there are many schools that attend multiple conferences a year and/or have delegates who have been attending conferences for several years. Since it takes so much for us to organize a physical conference like this and we tend to always have a high proportion of new delegates, OHS MUN does face special challenges due to the lack of experience. However, in my opinion, this focuses the weekend on the experience and learning from debate instead of awards, which I feel is quite meaningful and makes it less stressful for new delegates.
PJ: Do you think that Model UN helps students as far as developing skills like public speaking or leadership for future interests/careers/academic pursuits?
MH: Definitely! I personally feel that Model UN has played a key role in my development as a speaker and a leader. Model UN forces kids to think outside of their own perspective and how to defend a perspective they may not personally be invested in. Also, as a pretty introverted person, I feel like MUN has required me to step out of my comfort zone when talking to new people that has already been useful in job and college interviews and the like and I'm sure will serve me well in the future.