Bari Cohn
Staff Writer
A team of 31 Mira Costa advanced Model United Nations students traveled to Brown University Nov. 2-8 for the three-day Brown University Simulation of the United Nations Conference.
Costa students ended up winning 10 outstanding awards, nine best delegate awards and six commendations, which are fifth and sixth-place awards. BUSUN is one of six travel conferences that MUN attends throughout the year. There were about 900 students from all over the country at the BUSUN conference.
“I would consider this debate to be a success because everyone did their best,” MUN co-chief of staff Arish Vale said.
Costa has been to the BUSUN Conference four times previously. According to MUN teacher Wayne Knutson, conference attendees were selected by the MUN teachers in a very competitive process, which is based on their performance and effort they put forth during in-class and out-of-school debates such as the Edison conference.
“Over two-thirds of us got the higher tier of awards, and we did exceptional in just about everything,” Vale said.
In preparation for this debate, each attendee had to write a position paper for each of the three topics that his or her committee was debating. Students are put into groups. Each of the topics covers a different international issue. In addition, students had to prepare solutions for in-class roasts, which are questions regarding current events and policies.
“The roasts help us patch up flaws in our solutions and offer up better ideas,” junior Maddy Otto said. “They also prepare us for what to expect in debate. [We] were more prepared than other delegates at the conference. [Although] the style of debating was different, being on the East Coast, we managed to adapt to our committees and be a leader in each room.”
According to senior Brooke Gleason, Costa excels in speaking as well as having well thought out solutions prepared before going into debate. In this debate in particular, she believed Costa started and finished strong because students utilized leadership and speaking skills from the preparation they did before the debate.
“At this debate, we did as good as can be expected, and this was one of the best outcomes in a debate Costa has had so far,” Timberlake said. “The students had really solid knowledge and were able to transfer that knowledge into their speaking, and they interacted well with other kids from other schools.”
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