By Michael Todd
Staff Writer
A total of 60 students in the Mira Costa Model United Nations Program will attend the annual South Orange County Model United Nations conference on Saturday at Santa Margarita High School where Model United Nations programs from schools across Southern California will debate.
This event is the first of the year for the Costa MUN program. Mainly novice debaters will be attending, along with some of the advanced debaters. These students were chosen in order to give them more practice as well as helping them master their debate skills.
“SOCOMUN is the first conference of the year,” Secretary General and senior Matt Dumont said. “It’s typically used as a practice for students in the advanced class to get ready for more competitive conferences later in the year.”
The students who are attending the debate have been preparing since the beginning of the school year. As a form of preparation, the students have in class debates with their fellow classmates in order to better their debate skills and gain extra practice.
“Long-term schools that have been showing up repeatedly get preferred space,” Model UN teacher Bob Timberlake said. “It’s not that new schools can’t show up but if you’re a new school, you may only get space for 10 students.”
SOCOMUN is a conference that is held in order to earn novice debaters more practice as well as giving more experienced debaters time to prepare before they head into more meaningful conferences which will be held later in the year.
“This conference will give students a chance to practice or warmup,” Timberlake said. “They can bring back old skills and work in a couple of new ideas.”
The Mira Costa MUN official website.
This conference will feature many advanced debaters from Costa who will work on their technique and debate skills. However, most of the experienced debaters are not attending this event as it is primarily for novice debaters. The program is not putting as much emphasis on award because it is the first debate of the year.
“We usually don’t put much emphasis on awards,” Dumont said. “We focus more on preparation and honing debate skills for our beginning debaters.”
According to Dumont, SOCOMUN will kick off what he hopes to be a successful year for Costa’s MUN program. Mira Costa’s MUN program will be attending the Cerritos MUN conference at Cerritos High School on October 8th which will also give an opportunity for novice debaters to improve.
“We’re striving to win best school at every conference this year,” Dumont said. “It’s a hard goal to attain, but we’ve done it before and hopefully we can do it again this year.
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