Texas Model United Nations 2019:
I became involved with Model United Nations the fall semester of my Freshman year at Lamar. The Reaud Honors College was looking to bring back the United Nations program at Lamar and I was one of the students that expressed interest in the program. We had our first meeting late that November where we discussed Model UN itself, and started picking which member state we would like to represent at the Texas MUN Conference that February. We settled on Iran and Israel, and I chose to represent Iran in General Assembly Two with David Williams as my partner.
After the meeting we started preparing for the conference by doing extensive research on the history, culture, government, and current events of the region. As part of the process we drafted a position paper to submit to the conference that encompassed the topics of the assembly.
In the beginning of February, we attended the three day Texas Model United Nations conference at Lee College. During the conference, David and I collaborated with delegates from other Universities on a wide range of issues in order to draft resolutions that would meet the goals of the Assembly, while not violating the values of Iran.
National Model United Nations 2019:
In the fall semester of 2019, I took an Honors course for Model United Nations taught by Dr. Dodson and represented Lamar University at the D.C. conference in November as an Algerian Delegate.
To prepare, we immersed ourselves in the history and culture of Algeria and researched our topics extensively. My main topic was Ending the Use of Improvised Explosive Devices, Landmines, Cluster Munitions, and Other Explosives and my secondary topic, covered primarily by my partner Brendon Camp, was Towards a Nuclear-Weapon-Free World: Accelerating Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament. Brendon and I coauthored a position paper on these topics as Algeria.
After months of preparation, we attended the National Conference in Washington D.C. Although I have traveled fairly extensively in the US, this was my first time to visit Washington. I have always been interested in politics and government, and it was exciting to be able to see all the places that I am used to seeing on the news. One of my favorite parts of the trip, was being able to walk around D.C. and randomly stumble upon the things that I read about so often. For instance, one evening we were walking to a restaurant and on the way we accidentally found the Department of State, the World Health Organization, and the Embassy of Mexico.
During conference we discussed issues and drafted resolutions to address the topics. One of the central driving ideas behind the United Nations is for resolutions to be unanimous, and balancing the interests and ideals of every Member State to arrive to a single resolution takes a tremendous amount of communication and understanding.
Cade Pellerin 