On November 7, delegates from Parker’s Model UN dressed up in their western business attire and prepared their position papers, but instead of walking into Saint Ignatius College Prep for the Saint Ignatius Model UN conference, they opened their computers and logged in to Zoom. 

SIMUN XIX, Saint Ignatius’s 19th annual conference, welcomed around 800 students from around 45 schools. “SIMUN is the go-to. We would never skip one,” Upper School Model UN Captain and senior Grace Conrad said.

The conference ran from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. with a lunch break. In the morning, there was an opening ceremony with speeches by the Secretary-General, Secretariat, and faculty advisor. At 9:30, delegates split into their assigned committees for the first committee session, which ended at noon for lunch. At 1:00, delegates returned from lunch for the second committee session. The conference ended with a closing ceremony at 3:30.

There were 38 committees this year, ranging from more traditional topics such as the World Health Organization and UN Women to Lorax: Thneedville Urban Planning Board and Marvel’s Avengers: Rebuilding After the Endgame. 

Parker’s assigned positions included Megan Thee Stallion for the Rap in 2020 committee and Pam Beesly for The Office: Crises in the American Workplace. “We did get really really really good positions this year from SIMUN,” Conrad said. “It is one of the better years for us in terms of the positions we’re getting, and I think that it’s different because on Zoom there’s less competition.”

The preparation process was similar to in-person conferences, the only change was that prep meetings were online. Delegates met over Zoom to choose positions on October 13. By October 21, they turned in and peer-edited each other’s position papers for their first topic. Position papers are page long essays analyzing their country or person’s opinion on the assigned topic. The position papers for the second topic were due a week later and were also peer-edited. Final papers were due the following week and there was another meeting to go over final logistics the day before the conference.

Students at Saint Ignatius running the conference wanted to do the conference in-person and in the Spring, but eventually decided to do the conference online due to the pandemic. “COVID-19 happened, and we went to quarantine for two weeks, and I was like ‘oh whatever we’ll be back by April’ then ‘we’ll be back by May,’ and that just kept happening,” Secretary-General of SIMUN and Saint Ignatius College Prep senior Aidan Evans said. “By June, our proctor Ms. Haleas was like ‘we’re not going to be going back and the school’s not going to let us do the conference. Let’s start planning to do it over Zoom,’ and that was the moment we were like ‘oh shoot we have to change a lot of stuff, and we have to change how we’ve been doing it for 15 years.’”

During Parker Model UN symposia, there has been less participation. “We just want people to want to come up without an incentive for a trip, but I think that the incentive for SIMUN is to win the award,” Conrad said. “We’re still able to compete and people love doing that.”

Eight Parker students won awards at SIMUN. Juniors Jacob Boxerman and Alex Carlin as well as sophomore Rania Jones received the Best Delegate award. Senior Alex Schapiro received Outstanding Delegate. Seniors Julia Marks and Carter Wagner as well as junior Tess Wayland and sophomore Drew Klauber received Honorable Mentions. “The delegates have been working hard for almost two months now and they have been preparing really hard,” high school Model UN captain and junior Ivy Jacobs said. “I’m not surprised a lot of the Parker delegates won awards because they are extremely talented, and they always perform well.”

“I think being online made me feel a lot more comfortable and I think that when you are standing in a room and you have to walk up and stand at the podium nerves come so much easier,” Jones said. “But online I certainly found myself taking more opportunities and chances that I maybe would have been more resistant to in-person.”

Evans learned a lot about how to run SIMUN online based on two previous online conferences he had attended. One thing he learned was not to have a keynote speaker who usually speaks during the opening ceremony. Since the opening ceremony is first, he wanted it to be short and easy to follow. SIMUN also used Zoom rather than online event platform Gatherly due to issues that other online Model UN conferences had encountered. 

For freshman Julia Peet, SIMUN was her first high school conference. “Personally, compared to SIMUN last year, doing the conference on Zoom worked a lot better because it was really easy to pass notes and you could all work on a Google Doc to work on a resolution instead of writing it by hand,” Peet said.

During in-person conferences delegates usually do not have access to their laptops. “It’s hard because we want our delegates to get practice in feeling uncomfortable, and we want our delegates to feel like they’re in a new space,” Conrad said. “You want them to feel like they have stage fright because all of those things make you a better delegate, and when you’re sitting in your own room with the ability to read your notes, you lose that.”

However, Jacobs believed being online improved parts of debate. “You could use as many notes as you wanted but you could also research anything that you wanted in the middle of the conference and nobody would know,” Jacobs said. “I guess it enhanced debate in the way that people knew more, and they could answer questions and they could come up with whatever responses on the spot faster and more in-depth than they could in person without their laptops.” 

There were many benefits of being online for the students running SIMUN. “The benefit of doing it over Zoom ended up being that we didn’t have to do a lot of that in-person stuff like printing things out and the setting up chairs,” Evans said. “We really just had to focus on giving up positions and more logistical problems which I think helped us in the long run.”

Since SIMUN happens before delegates are picked for traveling conferences, many delegates who want to travel participate in it. This year there are no traveling conferences so there is no competition for those spots. “Now, it’s if you want to do SIMUN do SIMUN, so less people want to do it,” Conrad said. “The one thing that’s interesting though is it does show us who loves Model UN for the pure joy of doing well.”

Jacobs thinks there was less participation from older delegates because they had already experienced an in-person SIMUN.“I was pretty hesitant going into it just because sitting at a screen for seven consecutive hours does not seem that appealing,” Jones said. “But the conference was so organized and productive that it felt like a close attempt to how SIMUN is in-person.”

Delegates used Zoom features like virtual backgrounds, breakout rooms, and the chat to talk to other delegates and enhance debate. “It was what I expected in terms of Model UN procedure online but there were so many more opportunities to chat easier with people,” Jones said. “I think the community element of SIMUN was much stronger than I expected.”

During a SIMUN debrief following the conference, many delegates expressed that they enjoyed the conference. “Model UN kids like to have fun and that was clear on Zoom still,” Jacobs said.