Congratulations!

I haven't posted much recently and I doubt any of you guys actually check this but I wanted to congratulate everyone who went to the Davis Conference on their "Best Small Club" award. It is quite remarkable that a group of six sophomores would be able to win this. I especially want to congratulate Carson for his "Distinguished Delegate" award and Pearson for his "Outstanding Delegate" award. You guys did great.

On a side note, I believe that elections will be held this Thursday at lunch. To my knowledge any freshman, sophomore, or junior who has attended a conference is eligible to vote*. I am so impressed with you guys this year that there is so much interest in the club and leadership that for the first time in my knowledge there will be a real election. I have great faith in the future of our club at least until you guys graduate.

*Seniors might be included

Davis MUN Conference

I was wondering what countries you guys would like me to apply for in the Davis Conference. The sooner I get the country preferences, the better. I will check my e-mail for country preferences (carsonley@sbcglobal.net). Thanks for reading!

Berkeley Model UN - UPDATED...AGAIN!

A CHANGE WAS JUST MADE, ALL SPOTS THAT PREVIOUSLY WERE MAURITANIA ARE NOW SOUTH KOREA.

Now that Santa Clara is over, it's time to turn our attention to Berkeley. The Berkeley Model UN Conference is March 16, 17, & 18 at UC Berkeley. We have a very diverse assortment of spots, visible on the right side of the screen.

All of the committees except for the Crisis Simulation, are double delegation spots.

Please either post a comment or e-mail me stating who you will be working with and what are the top three committees you would like soon.

To be eligible for a committee award, position papers must be submitted by March 1. So please get them to me by this Monday (Feb. 26). As I stated in my last post, I'd like for us to do more research than we have in the past. This does not mean that we are going to be requiring people to spend hours upon hours learning the ins and outs of their topic, the purpose of MUN is still to be fun. What it does mean is that people will be required to submit some form of a position paper and are strongly encouraged to make it a good one.

Spots taken so far (others have talked with me, I just don't remember what spots they wanted):

South Korea on WTO - Hannah Marshall and Mike Danese
South Korea on UNEP - Anne Fraysse and Kennan Kronen
South Korea on UNHRC - Adil Nassan and Kyle Benner
South Korea on PBC - Pearson Lyverse
United Kingdom on IAEA - Tom Parkinson-Morgan and Oscar Cuming-Timms
Japan on IAEA - Jeremy L. Wolff and Victor Karadi
Guatemala on OAS - Andrew Hughes and Jenny Reich
Iranian Minister of Roads and Transportation on Crises Simulation - Sean Freedburg

Let's pull this together

I know we can do this, guys.


Berkeley MUN is, from what I've heard, very competitive. But the Acalanes team (hands down) has potential to do so well. We have an exceptional set of people here with excellent speaking skills and charisma, we just need to apply ourselves. Maybe it's time to cut down on some of the bullshit (although that is awesome, and by now we are all pros). Having actual facts and figures to back your opinions up and having a very solid position and profound knowledge of both the issue and the UN itself is IMMENSELY helpful.

With information and our excellent speakers, it'll be like taping two ninjas together to create one giant ninja. We'll be unstoppable.



-Herr Direktor, minister of propoganda, aka Tom.

What really happened at Santa Clara...

In response to Jeremy's request to clean up my post, I've decided to... clean up my post. So- here goes.

We completely dominated Santa Clara in a distinctly 'Paul-esque' fashion. Without much research or work compiling position papers we were able to completely out-MUN the other schools present at the conference. That being said, Cal High won the gavels (which we arguably deserved) due to the inordinate amount of work they put into their (27 page long) position papers.

In conclusion, I'm just going to whine some more about how we should have won and blahdee blah blah.

Go Dons! (We need a MUN cheer btw)

Santa Clara wrap up

Well, the Santa Clara Conference went well. We had 13 students there both days of the conference. Out of these 13, 9 won awards, including three new delegates (Oscar Cuming-Timms, Anne Fraysse, and Pearson Lyvers). These awards were:

Outstanding Delegation:

Andrew Hughes & Jenny Reich - USA on UNDP
Jeremy L. Wolff & Oscar Cuming-Timms - USA on Legal
Stephan Chan - USA on IAEA

Honorable Mention:

Tom Parkinson-Morgan & Miguel Lopez - USA on SOCHUM
Anne Fraysse & Pearson Lyverse - Greece on SOCHUM

This was all quite impressive. Had Cal High not been at the conference Acalanes would have received multiple gavels not just Outstanding Delegation awards but this conference taught us something. Our rivals at Cal High prepared a lot more than we did. While many of us didn't even write position papers, the position papers of Cal High delegates reached up to 27 pages in length. In the olden days of Model UN we'd be able to arrive without researching and still win hands down, those days are over. The quality of competition in Model UN has gotten much higher and so our quality of competition must rise as well.

Ever since the class of '04 graduated Acalanes MUN has focused a majority of its energy on recruiting new delegates. We will continue to try to get more members but from now on our main focus has to be getting our current delegates to be the best they can be. We still have both Berkeley and Davis to prove ourselves. Carson Ley will be doing most of the organizational work for the Davis conference because I will not be able to attend (it's the same weekend as Senior Ball) but this will free me up to focus on training. Acalanes proved to be the most talented at this conference, performing top notch with little research or preparation, with a bit more work we will regain our spot as the best MUN club in Northern California.