Harvard National Model United Nations 2018 (HNMUN'18)
About
HNMUN is the largest, oldest, and one of the most prestigious conference of its kind. It brings over 3,000 students and faculty together from colleges and universities around the world to Boston, MA and simulates the United Nations. HNMUN is a unique opportunity to experience the challenges of international negotiation, diplomacy and compete among the best in the world.
Selection
Every year, the Debating Society of Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology (my former college now NSUT) has a tradition to send a delegation of undergraduate students to participate and compete among the best in the world at the Harvard National Model United Nations. It all starts with a rigorous selection procedure in which the candidates are tested upon their oratory skills, logical reasoning, diplomacy, and overall personality traits. The candidates are made to go through a series of selection round and in the end, from over 250+ applications, the alumni and senior DebSoc members carefully select 10–15 students. Finally, we: a group of engineering students, compete against MBAs, PhDs, Doctors and Political Science majors from all around the world.
Training
The selected candidates are made to go through rigorous training sessions for over three months in which they further enhance their oratory skills, logical reasoning and learn valuable skills such as diplomacy, negotiation, etc. The delegation is made to participate in several intra-college and inter college MUNs to practically test their skills. They even engage in dialogue with several diplomats of their representative nation to know more about their political stances on critical issues.
We trained for over 3 months (every during the December Winter break) and visited the Embassy of Switzerland for a lunch briefing.
The Conference
The 4-day long conference takes place in various halls at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel during the chilly month of February. Delegates from all over the world start approaching the venue 1–2 days before the conference. The conference kicks off with an opening ceremony in The Grand Ballroom. During this time, delegations put up their country’s flag all over the hall and cheer for their country. After a brief opening ceremony, the committee sessions starts to take place. To avoid long texts, I have attached the committee schedule. Most of us were in a double-delegation committee (wherein two people work as a team and represent the same country). One of the members had to stay out of the hall (preferably) to “lobby,” and the other had to attend the session. The format of HNMUN is significantly different from the regular MUN’s. At HNMUN, there is a lot of emphasis on diplomacy rather than actual debate.
The Fun Part
- Delegation Dance
- Cultural Night
- Winning Annual HNMUN Snapchat Filter Competitions :’)
- The 12 Day Trip to New-York after the conference
- Memories that we live on
