What's Up Statesmen: Model UN On A Roll

What's up Statesmen? This blog is a way to keep track of what's happening at George C. Marshall High School.

This week: A look at the school's Model UN program, their recent win and upcoming competitions.

Monika Bapna, a GCM Senior and MUN participant, reported for this post.

Statesmen took home several awards at the 26th annual William & Mary High School Model United Nations Conference. Specifically, Taruni Paleru (‘14) and Sam Carpenter (‘14) earned an Outstanding Delegation award in the Disarmament and National Security Committee for their representation of Azerbaijan, and Andrew Crider (‘13) earned an Honorable Delegation award for his portrayal of Cecil Parkinson, Paymaster-General, in the 1982 British Cabinet Joint Crisis Committee. We also brought home a school award - the prestigious Erica C. Chiusano Award – presented for outstanding devotion to international service. Special thanks also goes to Faith Boettger and Susan Hoffman who made this successful trip a possibility!

Other updates:

George C. Marshall’s Model United Nations Club hosted its ninth annual My First MUN Training Conference on Saturday, October 13th.  The topic for this year’s conference was cyber security, an issue that is becoming increasingly important in view of the frequency of attacks on vital systems dependent on information technology.  Nearly  250 students from Marshall and other neighboring high schools and middle schools attended this year’s conference.

MFMUN is an all-day training conference for students wishing to participate in the
MUN club and provides them with skills like public speaking, writing positions papers and doing research to better prepare themselves for MUN conferences. The students learn these skills in the morning sessions and in the afternoon they are divided into separate classrooms to practice those skills in mock conferences.

Marshall High School hosts this conference annually and partners up with the MUN club at the University of Virginia.  The International Relations Organization at UVA provides experienced members to chair the afternoon committee simulations. The faculty sponsors of the MUN club at Marshall are social studies teachers Tom Brannan, who has been a sponsor for the club for 11 years, and Ilsa Tinkelman, a recent graduate of the College of William and Mary, where she took part in Model UN at the collegiate level.

Planning for this year’s conference began during the spring and continued into the summer and fall, and was led by a 16-member steering committee headed by Marshall seniors Monika Bapna and Jasmine Oo. 

Funds raised by the conference helped defray the cost of the MUN Club’s participation in conferences at the University of Virginia (Nov. 2-4), the College of William and Mary (Nov. 7-9) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the spring.