I spent last week in New York at the umpteenth annual National Model United Nations. The conference is an annual simulation in which each nation is represented by a different university (many international) which are split to various committees (like the Security Countil, the IAEA, or a General Assembly) to debate different issues.

The conference is a mix of the strangest sort of people.

There are the die-hard MUNers who are there to win awards, working through lunch and all breaks on resolutions. Hyper-intelligent and equally intolerable, you can pick them out of a group immediately: they will ask you to meet tomorrow morning two hours before the 9am session, to which the appropriate response is a muffled giggle.

Then there are their opposites, students from schools who don’t send faculty sponsors and may not actually come to sessions. At the precious rare times when they do try to participate in a paper their comments are beyond asinine and uninformed.

Most of the students fell somewhere in-between these extremes. They were impassioned and sincere with honest objections and questions about the way countries relate to each other. In-character dialogues about issues in the simulation echoed the sentiments of students trying to solve major world problems. Who knows, maybe one of them will.

I’m not going to lie and pretend I now believe the UN is the answer to all of the world’s problems. It didn’t change my mind about its problems. What it did do unexpectedly well was highlight for me exactly why there are problems. It was a highly educational experience in how the interactions of peoples are stalled even with so much at stake.

At one point in my conference we had almost written (a very unrealistic) nuclear disarmament treaty and gotten Israel, Syria, Iran to agree to the terms. But when the issue of which countries would be sponsors came up the entire thing folded. The treaty was split across multiple groups that didn’t speak for two days.

Though occasionally frustrating it is a great trip. If you are hunting for a GST credit, love pizza or cheesecake, or have an interest in international politics, you should check it out.

Bobby Debelak is a senior political science major who takes himself much too seriously. He can be reached for comment at rdebel00@leeu.edu

Dr. Swindle is the trip sponsor for MUN, which is an annual Class and/or GST trip every spring. For more details, he can be reached at sswindle@leeuniversity.edu