JOINMUN

I Barely Remember Anything

I don't know if it's just the circumstance in which the conference is held for me that made me barely remember anything from it but I really don't remember much. It should be a notable conference considering that it's my first MO award, but I don't see it that way in retrospect. I certainly remember that I enjoyed this MUN, but I think it's forgettable because it's just really straight-edged. Despite the subject matter, it's just a very straight-to-the-point and serious conference, no wackiness like in my previous MUN.

Maybe the most memorable of it is actually the fact that one of the chair just straight-up bailed in the last minute. And so chair Edwin and Nicole (both of whom was retiring after this MUN) was a bit overwhelmed chairing without a third chair during the whole conference.

How It Went

What I did remember is that it really went as how a typical MUN conference at low-politics went. 2 blocs were formed with marginally different solutions to one another that only differs in implementation, and then there were back and forth between the 2 blocs for merging that went nowhere, and when the DR from the 2 blocs was voted upon, both failed. The end.

Both blocs has vastly different stances (one is skeptical of marijuana, one embraces marijuana) but both of them came to an agreement that marijuana should at least be tried for medical uses. There were also more attention paid into the status of money generated from marijuana considering its varying legality worldwide (the study guide does put emphasis more on that angle instead of the simplistic debate of marijuana good or bad), which results in really interesting and nuanced debate, bringing up as well relevant agencies such as the FATF and the Interpol in the debate.

Takeaways

There were quite a bit of good advice given to me in my personal feedback from chair Edwin. One of which was for me to refrain from speaking when I don't really have anything substantial to add to the debate. If you remember, one of the advice given to me by my friend before my first MUN was to just always speak during the conference. Any MCs or UMCs, just always try to speak. I think it's a good advice for beginners, for the sake of training yourself to be comfortable speaking during the conference. But as you join more and more MUNs and have grown over that initial "shyness" of giving a speech, you will have to scale back and focus on the substance of your speech. You still need to speak a lot, ideally every time, but make sure to back your speech with sufficient substance. And so that feedback becomes a bit of a paradigm shift for me to start digging ever deeper into the topic at hand so I always have a novel point to say. I think most of my speech in this conference is substantive just because I tend to get lost in research, which makes me almost always have something to say. But I can see a handful of them being a simple regurgitation of point brought up before or just filled with fluff, and that's what chair Edwin is pointing out.