On February 6, the Model UN team–23 delegates–traveled to American University for AMERIMUNC XII. AMERIMUNC (American Model UN Conference) is one of the top conferences in the country, which hosted approximately 1200 delegates this year. The conference featured 45 schools from across the nation, as well as two international schools from Italy and Mexico.
Norwin dominated this conference, with five students taking home awards. In Model UN awards, an honorable mention is equivalent to 3rd, Outstanding Delegate is equivalent to second, and Best Delegate is equivalent to first. Sophia Tokay, Aiden Colauita, and Finnian Cunning won honorable mentions in their respective committees: The Paris Peace Conference, the Cabinet of Spain, and the United Nations Committee on Trade and Development. Joe Cramer received the outstanding delegate award for his role in the cabinet of Transnistria. Only one student won Best Delegate, Carter Kunicky, for his role in the Cabinet of South Ossetia.
“All the students did a fantastic job and represented a level of professionalism that is expected at such a prestigious international conference,” said Sturm. “Go Knights!”
Earlier in the year, on the weekend of Nov. 13-15, Norwin students traveled to the University of Virginia(UVA) to participate in their annual Model United Nations (MUN) conference. Mrs. Sturm traveled with the 10 students and other students from Fox Chapel’s Model UN branch to the University of Virginia for the conference.
Aiden Perry won the Outstanding Delegate award representing George Townshend in the House of Lords Committee, Aiden Colaiuta won Honorable Mention representing Ahn, Cheol-Soo in the WGSS: National Assembly Committee, and Roman Ola won Best Delegate representing Cachino in the Fallout Committee.
This conference had a few Crisis Committees, which are committees where things are constantly updating and growing based on the delegates’ actions.
“Personally, for me,” said junior Aiden Colaiuta. “I really liked how this crisis that I did was set up. I’ve done multiple-way crises before, but the fact that this one was a four-way, and they were able to collect things so fast and make it so fast pace of an experience that I thought that was just excellent. It’s probably been one of my favorite crises so far.”
Crisis conferences are always action-packed and full of excitement; you could die more than once and keep going as a new character.
”In my committee,” said junior Roman Ola. “I had four assassination attempts on my life and died twice. I eventually controlled a whole army at the end, so these murders did not affect me greatly.”
At a MUN conference, you are judged on a few things, and the students mentioned above won awards for their excellent performance live in the conference room. They went above and beyond with participation, influence, and commitment to character.
“I was definitely personally one of the best speakers in the front room,“ said Colaiuta.” I was able to take control of the room with a bunch of different things and was able to honestly manipulate the situation in order to help me I as a business owner or as playing the role of a business owner, I took Multiple economic controls and put them completely in my favor and I also just completely manipulated the situation so that I could be on the cabinet of the president as one of the biggest business owners and just completely use it for my private interest.”
Commitment to character is more than just running things behind the scenes, but also putting on a show for the rest of the conference to see.
”I felt like I was extremely creative with the way I performed by crisis arc, talked, and overall acted during committee,” said Ola. “I did a New York accent for half the committee until I died and performed an Ancient Roman accent near the end.”
With the help of the faculty advisor, Larissa Sturm, this trip will continue to be an annual event filled with fun challenges for the future.
”I would just like to thank Mrs. Sturm for making this such a fun time,” said Colaiuta. “She definitely takes a lot of time to prepare for it, and I know that there was a lot of panic because of all the different events going on at the same time, and the fact that she was able to coordinate was just fantastic.”
