Countries that join the United Nations get a complementary (and stylish) helmet to go with their membership. While you won’t find any helmets atop the heads of Liberty’s Model UN team, you will find another important quality: determination.

Model United Nations is a program that allows students the opportunity to simulate the real United Nations, a coalition that seeks to promote global peace and security. The students’ role in Model UN conferences is to select a country to represent and write a position paper on a particular issue that the country is facing while also considering that country’s views on such an issue. This allows students to attempt to solve real-world problems including climate change, overpopulation, and desertification.

Model UN holds competitions and conferences for any school to participate in, most notably the Pacific Model UN conference in which seven Liberty competitors each won an award.

Liberty’s Model UN club has been a part of Liberty since it was restarted in 2020, during the pandemic. Most of the award winners have been a part of Model UN since this restart, such as seniors Rachel Hines, Nicole Hume, and Somit Mathur.

“I joined when I was a sophomore and the club first started. I love that Model UN has a competitive aspect that allows you to speak on the perspective of a certain country,” Hines said.

Model UN does not follow a standard format for debating, something many of the winners enjoy. This style of practice has helped many competitors prepare for the competition.

“In Model UN, you can be both funny and serious when debating. That aspect definitely helped me win,” Hume said.

The Model UN competitions are practice for considering different perspectives, since the countries that are represented often have different views than what people are used to growing up with.

“Oftentimes, when I’m researching a country, they have perspectives and policies that I am not used to,” Hines said.

Model UN assigns people to random countries and the issues affecting them. For Mathur, who won Outstanding Delegate, learning is part of the fun of Model UN.

“I felt like I could learn more about the African Union. When I researched it and took part in the committee, I learned a lot; it was a valuable experience for me even outside of the club,” Mathur said.

Another winner who was assigned to the African Union was junior Minot Elias, who rose above the other 54 people in that committee, winning Best Delegate.

“I wanted to compete because it was my favorite conference in that area of Model UN,” Elias said.

For junior Henry St. Pierre Nelson, PACMUN doubled as his first competition and his first win. Going to the competition with his friends was the only reason he needed to participate and win second place in his committee.

“I wasn’t inspired by anything; I went to this competition because a lot of my friends were going, and it seemed like a fun time,” Nelson said.

One challenge the competitors faced was finding enough information about obscure issues, such as finding multiple perspectives on a controversial issue in countries that have restrictions on what people are allowed to look up online. Despite this, sophomore Amelia Matin proved her resolve by digging through the Model UN databases during the research process and ultimately winning Best Delegate for United Nations High Council of Refugees.

“I was representing Syria, so it was challenging to find information. It often is, since there’s not a lot of information about different countries,” Matin said. “There was a lot of research that went into my paper.”

Representing countries’ about political issues isn’t the only thing that Liberty won awards for, as junior Shelby Mallard proved by winning Best Delegate at UNEP, the section of Model UN that deals with environmental issues.

“The issue that I tackled was chlorofluorocarbons. That issue had already been solved, but we were reworking it in a fun way,” Mallard said.

These seven winners have been awarded for their amazing ability to think on their feet and their dedication to researching the issues they are writing about. Above all else, they have been recognized because of the way they are able to support their positions on complex global problems with the limited resources they have been given. Even with all of this work, they still enjoy what they do.

“Model UN is a good time,” Mathur said. “I definitely recommend it for everybody.”