PresMUN

Backstory

I was just hungry for more MUN after SMUN and thought that this MUN could be a testing ground for the many advice and lesson learned from SMUN.

Finally Making a Position Paper Worth Reading

One of my biggest regret from SMUN was my dumpster fire position paper. So the first order of business for this MUN is to actually write a good position paper. There were 4 main things that I did in pursuit of that :

1. Before the allocations was even given, I contacted 4 of my acquaintances from previous MUNs who had won the BPP award for their position papers. I got back 5 position papers that won BPP. They were then used as a reference during the writing process.

2. I had 3 people proofread my position paper.

3. I immediately worked on my position paper after I received my allocation.

4. As I research the topic and gather new information, I also sketch out a solution based on those new information. This is very different to my previous MUN where I usually get lost on the research regarding the topic itself, while the solution became an afterthought.

The third point is particularly important in this case since the timeline of the MUN is quite tight, there were only a week to work for the position paper.

The fourth point paid off big time because although I did spent the first 3 days of the given week on working on the position papers, I was only able to continue working on the position paper in the last day of the week due to procrastination and having other things to do. But because this. I did the fourth point because one of the advice I had received about how to write a good position paper (I asked a few people about this in the early days of me working on the position paper) was that delegates often focus too much on the problem but not enough on the solution.

One of my biggest weakness is that I can't really write a good comprehensive solution that can stand on its own. After SMUN, I realized that in all of my previous MUNs, I usually walked in to the conference having little to no solutions planned, which would be fine if I was able to draft up solutions during the conference, but I'm not really good at that. I usually just add on to other people's solution or draft resolutions but I cannot really make a DR on my own from scratch. This is a particularly bad weakness because it hinders my ability to form a bloc of my own since my solutions or my input is closely coupled to other members of the bloc that I am a part of. But by doing the fourth point, I took the right direction of overcoming this weakness of mine.

The Conference

Too Little Time

I think this MUN was not very well put together for several reasons, mainly concerning the scheduling for the events in it.

The committee sessions were few. There were only 5 comses, 3 in the second day and 2 on the last day (the first day only consists of opening with no comses). But each of them lasts 2.5 hours, which is too long. Especially compared to the break times between the committee sessions of only 30 minutes, far from sufficient for comses of such length. It makes the MUN very draining that by the end of the first day, me and my bloc members just wanted to rest. So we agreed to defer drafting to the next day.

The issue above is compounded by the fact that the comses wasn't finished until 7 o'clock. This is my first MUN that doesn't finish by sundown. It is also the reason why my bloc members was too exhausted to start drafting that night. More importantly, it makes most delegates too exhausted to attend the social night that was supposed to start only an hour after the end of the last comses on the first day. I was also too tired to attend the social night and chose to sleep early instead.

There were also not enough time to do amendments of DR. In my council, once two of the DR was introduced and debated, the council immediately moved on to the voting procedure. This is not too big of a deal however as I think most MUNs also suffers from this (the only previous MUN I attended that had sufficient time for amendments was SMUN and JOINMUN).

Another huge issue I have is the fact that the rundown seems to not take into account the time for Maghrib prayer. If my memory serves me correctly, the last committee session on the second day (comses 3) was running from 5.10 to 7.40, which envelopes the whole interval for Maghrib prayer. I had to send a Zoom message to the chairs informing that I'll be away for 10 minutes to pray in the middle of comses to do my prayer because there was no official breaks for that.

The central problem is summed up below :

1. The second day ended too late. Should've ended before sundown.

2. The committee sessions was too long. Should've been 1.5 to 2 hours long instead.

3. The breaks between committee sessions was too short. There should've been at least one or two breaks that lasts an hour.

The first problem could've been avoided if they had used the first day for comses as well (at least two of them) and not just for opening. The second and third problem should've been obvious to any person that have ever joined a handful of MUNs when they saw the rundown, thus I was quite baffled that no one in the committee for this MUN called out that issue before finalizing the rundown.

Hectic and Crowded

This is the most active council I've ever attended. Everybody wanted to raise a motion, make a speech, be in the GSL, etc.. The debate was fierce and lively all the way through simply because of how active the delegates are. It really humbles me as a delegate because my presence in a council is usually above average by default, without putting any extra effort, but this particular council shows me that I really need to step up my game to be able to stand out regardless of the situation.

Takeaways

I was very grateful that I finally managed to nail down how to write a position paper The biggest takeaway is I finally figured out how to write a good position paper. Hopefully I can replicate this success in all of my future MUNs so that I can continue to win BPP award.

Huge shout out to chair Ferdinand and chair Tracy for giving a very helpful and comprehensive feedback for me. I see how I wasn't able to fully mitigate or resolve all of my shortcoming in SMUN. But I am now emboldened to take further steps to work on them in my next MUN.

A particular piece of feedback that stood out to me was how I didn't manage to propose a lot of motions (I only managed to propose one for the whole conference). I think this was partially due to me just not being fast enough to raise my hand on Zoom to propose motions. But more importantly I think it was also because I didn't have a robust system in place to figure out what motions to be brought up next. In ITBMUN, I had determined before the conference what motions I should bring up by making a somewhat comprehensive plan for the flow of debate. But in the MUNs after that I done away with doing so because I found that the complex debate plan was not reflective of the dynamic nature of MUNs. Now I think I should have such a debate plan, just one that is more dynamic and adjustable to the situation. Such a system could work like this :

1. Have a collection of unordered issues or topic to bring up before the conference.

2. Each topic in the collection should contain the speech to be spoken during the topic or at least what substance should be brought up in the topic.

3. For each topic, determine under what circumstances should it be raised.

Such a system could reduce the overhead of figuring out what motion to raise during the conference by computing it ahead of time instead. Point 1 and 2 also gives more direction and enhance the effectiveness & efficiency of the research before the conference, something that I also need to improve since being lost in the research have been a running theme for my MUN journey thus far.