Becoming better global citizens was just a bonus for four Cal Poly students who participated in a Model United Nations conference in Quito, Ecuador in January. As representatives of the university’s Model UN club, political science juniors Tim Black, Keiko Osumi, Sarah Prince and senior Casey Adams, learned international diplomacy by taking part in pretend crisis situations as representatives of a foreign country. The three juniors also took home awards.
The Model United Nations program, run by the National Collegiate Conference Association, is a nonprofit organization that teaches global issues to college students from around the world. The program is designed for students to engage in issues similar to those faced by the real United Nations. Each school is assigned a country and each student is divided into a different committee meant to represent their assigned country. The committees look at topics such as nuclear proliferation and the illegal detainment of diplomats.
Stepping into the shoes of another person is exactly what Professor Craig Arceneaux, chair of the political science department, said he wanted the students to experience. Arceneaux, who has been the university’s program coordinator since coming to Cal Poly in 2001, traveled with the students to the international conference. Students from approximately 30 other schools from around the world, such as Universidad San Francisco de Quito and Universidad Icesi from Colombia, attended.
Arceneaux said the most important part of the conference is for the students to believe in their roles as diplomats and, in doing so, to experience a way of learning different from lectures and textbook readings.
“When we’re able to go abroad, it really makes students realize that they’re global citizens,” Arceneaux said. “It makes students realize that it’s not just simply sitting in a classroom and reading about other countries, but that there’s actually events in people’s lives at work in different countries … Everything just becomes, obviously, more realistic after that.”
One way the program works to make the entire conference realistic is by assigning each student to a committee similar to those that are a part of the United Nations. As representatives of Turkey, Black was assigned to the General Assembly while Osumi and Prince were members of the Security Council. The purpose of the assembly is to appoint temporary members of the council and to manage the United Nations’ budget. Osumi and Prince were part of a group in charge of keeping peace and commissioning military action. Their first assignment was to deal with a nuclear distribution problem in Venezuela through Iran. Osumi said representing a country that is not one of the five main powers in the United Nations helped her see that compromising an effective strategy.
“You see where international players, big or small, play in in that compromise for the better of all, not just the United States, which is the perspective we usually go in with,” Osumi said.
Osumi and Prince’s second assignment was to deal with civilians in armed conflict, but they were interrupted when the earthquake in Haiti hit. Osumi said they were able to use the real-life crisis as an example of a situation that the real United Nations might encounter by putting out a resolution similar to how the council would to resolve issues with humanitarian aid. Creating a solution to the Haiti crisis is something Osumi said she won’t forget.
“You’re in a conference room, you have no idea really what’s going on in the real world because time kind of freezes for these conferences, but when Haiti happened and being able to say ‘OK this is what we would do,’ putting ourselves in that real time pressure, was a lot of fun,” Osumi said. “I mean it doesn’t affect how things turned out in the real world as much, but we definitely felt the pressure and saw how fast you need to act when it’s people’s lives at hand.”
Due to an odd number of students, Adams was assigned to Jordan and was a member of the International Court of Justice, the main function of which is to settle legal disputes between nation states. Adams, who wants to go into law in the future, said the conference gives students a deeper view into what they want to do later in life.
“It’s a lot like going to a career day, except it’s actually doing it and you get to experience everything that would go into that career if you wanted to do it, but it’s just like a mini-version,” Adams said.
Attending the conference not only gave the students a glimpse into a possible future career, but it also helped become open-minded when looking at global issues and stereotypes of other countries. Adams was surprised at how well the Ecuadorian students spoke English. Osumi had thought Colombia had many economic ties with drugs. But after spending time with students from a university in Colombia, she realized they’re not as different as she initially thought.
“They respect education just as much as we do,” Osumi said. “While they still have a drug problem, so do we, and you have to respect that that’s not the stereotype you can put all their people under.”
Meeting students and ambassadors from all over the world wasn’t the only part of the trip that helped to shape the students. Black, who has traveled to different areas of Europe, said that prior to the trip to Ecuador, he had never seen poverty on such a large scale. What really hit home for Black was the average monthly wage in Ecuador.
The group’s tour guide said the average wage is 200 U.S. dollars a month, approximately $2,400 a year. The entire economic situation in Ecuador made him realize how sheltered he was growing up in San Diego. Two images that stayed with Black were seeing homes with no roofs and an immense amount of looting on the street. Black said he wondered about the state of the rest of the country when the capital was in such poor shape.
“You can see houses falling off the hillside and you realize how important the decisions that these people make are,” Black said. “I feel like I already have a commitment to make the world a better place. It just kind of reinforces that view that you want to make a change.”
That commitment showed at the conference as well. At the end of the four-day conference, three of the students were recognized with awards voted on by their peers and the chair of the program. Osumi and Prince won first place for their outstanding delegation among the security council committees by staying “in character” as representatives of their assigned country. As a group, Osumi, Prince and Black won the distinguished delegation award for their representation of Turkey. Arceneaux said winning the awards shows not only that the students were learning, but that they took advantage of their learning.
“(Traveling) makes them think and makes them recognize that life takes place very differently in different countries and they need to be a little more aware of how their own understanding of places and events and how they might be perceived elsewhere,” Arceneaux said.
For Adams, who has participated in the program for eight years, the Model United Nations club has helped him learn to appreciate “the other side of the coin.” Without appreciating others’ views and assimilating a little into the culture they’re visiting, Adams said it’s hard to be successful and take everything they can from the experience.
“I feel like, if I’m going into law, you can’t argue a case and not know the other side, and I feel like that’s the beauty of Model United,” Adams said. “For example, if you’re Jewish, and you have to (represent) Palestine, you’re forced to learn the other side of the issue whether you want to or not, and you have to be passionate about it. I think that’s a great skill that you especially learn when you go to an international conference, you have to learn how to take yourself out of it and be what you need to be to succeed at the conference.”