I got to spend the past weekend at my first ever Model United Nations conference in Seattle! The above picture is our UBC’s General Assembly Plenary group. I’m sort of squished in the middle there, hehe.

This conference was quite easily one of the most exhausting and rewarding thing I’d done in a long, long time. The hours were gruelling, the debates were intense, the diplomacy was draining, the headaches were serious and the satisfaction was great. Nothing is better than spending hours writing, editing and editing that one resolution only to have it be passed by the whole assembly!

I feel kind of bad for the hotel that had to house 400+ university kids as, you know, we aren’t exactly the calmest, cleanest bunch of clientele. Still, the restaurants around the area (especially this cool subway style pizza place) definitely got a lot of customers that weekend.

Seriously, those pizzas were the most delicious things ever. Granted, I am now a little bit sick of pizza after eating so much of it, but god damn, it was good.

Anyway, this Seattle trip was my first official university excursion with a real, honest to goodness club, and I had a great time! Even though the public speaking parts of the conference was terrifying, and even though dealing with some unsavoury people was tough, and even though hauling my ass out of bed at 7AM on a Sunday morning felt like several shades of wrong, it was worth everything.

I went into this thing being so fucking anxious that I didn’t manage to get very much sleep the night before, and then the train ride there was me mostly trying to sleep so I wouldn’t feel so nauseated by that same anxiety. It was just so intimidating to be doing this for the first time when there were others who had done more competitive conferences, or even those who had done it in high school. Those people just seemed to know what to do, and I felt totally alone in being completely lost.

But once the conference actually started, everything was a breeze. In every conference like this, there is a chance to win some rather fancy awards, but I went into this thing not expecting to win anything at all. I mean, c’mon, expecting an utter noob winning an award is a little naïve, isn’t it? By the end of it all, I was just glad I managed to play a rather big role in writing one of the seven resolutions that passed. I made some cool new friends…who I will probably never see again because they’re American but – hey! – maybe I’ll catch them at another Model UN conference.

Was I a very good delegate? Hell, no! I know where I can be better, and I’m definitely nowhere near as good as some of my teammates who excel in areas of diplomacy, public speaking and people skills. But I really did find a surprising amount of fun from doing this thing, so I think I will be sticking with this. Hopefully I’ll start to get better and feel confident enough to be that go-getter that so many of the more experienced delegates had been.

For now, I think I can say that things certainly went a lot better than I expected.

Shout out to the entire UBC Northwest Model UN team (as pictured above) for being a generally nice and fun group to travel and work with! Also to the awesome Head Delegates that were there for us noobs when we needed help and support. You guys are awesome. 🙂