Introduction
This was a project that I had experience with in the past since we had done it in middle school, but here is an explanation of what MUN is for those of you who don't know. Model United Nations is exactly what it sounds like it's pretty much a replica of the United Nations with high school students representing each country. The topic we had to discuss about and research about from our assigned country's perspective was the Syrian refugee crisis and the country I got assigned was Austria and I was part of committee number 2 which overall had a very interesting and active conference.
Info on Austria
As you can see Austria is locating in Central Europe, in between to Germany, Italy and Hungary. Austria is a Federal Parliamentary Republic and the current president is Alexander Van der Bellen. It has a population of nearly 9 million people and over 1% of that is refugees meaning that is has been open to many refugees. The reason for this is because Austria has been enforcing Germany's open border policy, unfortunately this has come to an end because of how many refugees we have taken in and also because of the billions of euros this is costing Austria. The attitude of Austrian citizens towards refugees is very mixed because we have many people who are open to having refugees come in but at the same time other people who aren't too sure about bringing in refugees especially since there have been some incidents.
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The Most Useful Article
This was really hard to use because I used over ten articles and a lot of them had really important and similar parts, so I decide to choose two articles. The first one is from theguardian.com and it really helped me add more statistics to my article and it also helped me understand the history of Austria's relationships with refugees. It also different topics within Austria and the refugees that I hadn't seen before which led me to look further into those topics. Finding this article wasn't too hard because theguardian.com is a well known website and it was one of the first articles in the search results.
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Position Paper
The purpose of a position paper is to express your country's stance on the issue you are discussing and it's also a great way of having all your research in one place. My position paper didn't change much from the first draft to the second one but I did notice a huge difference on our last critique which was our third draft. The main reason why my position paper changed so much in this part was mainly because we had everyone with the same country critique each others position papers, which meant that we had four people look at our articles and provide great feed back. The comments that helped me improve my position paper the most were the ones that would point out specific areas in my paper and how to improve them. For example Michael pointed out in one of my paragraphs that I had a lot of examples of what Austria had done to help out the crisis but not many statistics to back up my examples and as soon as I changed that it made my article much stronger. What I am most proud about in my position paper has to be either the first or second paragraph because I think they are both strong paragraphs with lots of facts and really catch your attention.
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Opening Speech
An opening speech is what you say in the beginning of the conference to inform other delegates about your country's stance and ideas for resolutions on the problem. I found it very helpful to take notes on every countries opening speech because by doing that I could determine who I could work with as a country and what other countries had to offer. You can take a look at my position paper by clicking on the button to the right. My position paper had a pretty drastic change from the first draft to the second one because on my first draft all I really had was the structure of what I wanted to say and for my second draft I put in all the facts and statistics which definitely made it a better speech. The two best pieces of critique I got on my opening speech were to add more information on what Austria had done to help end this crisis and how it had affected Austria. I also was told to take my time when reading my speech so that it was clear and it would make it sound more professional. If I could change something from my opening statement it would be to add what my country had to offer since I forgot to include that.
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Conference Experience |
Key Moment |
During the conference there were a lot of good moments and I what I was most proud of was my participation because through out the whole conference, I felt like I made very thoughtful and smart comments and questions. As a committee I thought we were really productive and came up with great ideas but if I were to change something it would have to be the fact that we never talked about were exactly the refugees would be within the countries that were accepting them, so just being clearer about our resolutions. The best advice I could give a student who will do this project is to research a lot about your country and the problem because when you have knowledge on the topic you feel confident which will lead to a successful conference.
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Our conference was going really well the first day every country/delegate was getting along and we were really close to almost creating a resolution, I honestly thought it was too good to be true and it was starting to get boring since not much action was happening. Luckily right after lunch Macedonia decided that it would opt out of the plan to help any refugees and everyone went crazy, I also decided to act exactly how Austria is acting in this crisis which is to currently close it's borders which lead to the conference topic changing that exact moment. This definitely
made the conference more interesting and lead me to add it to my key moments. |
Gallery
Here you can see Mr. Laszo in the opening This is in our conference when we would have an unmoderated caucus and all the delegates would get
ceremony wishing us good luck in our two day up and talk to other delegates about resolution ideas or any other important topics.
conference.
ceremony wishing us good luck in our two day up and talk to other delegates about resolution ideas or any other important topics.
conference.