There were 2,000 delegates at the Opening Ceremonies.
This past Thursday, nine Wooster students traveled by coach bus to downtown Philadelphia for a Model UN Conference. This conference, called ILMUNC, was hosted by UPenn students in the downtown Marriott on Broad Street in Philly. Wooster’s Model UN club has been attending this conference for several years and is returning after a one-year hiatus. ILMUNC stands for the Ivy League Model United Nations Conference and is one of the most popular conferences internationally. People traveled from places all over the country, including New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, California, the DMV area, and internationally, including Brazil and France. With a total of 2,000 delegates, it is a place to meet people from all over the world.
Prepping for an event like this involves many moving pieces. As a club, we do not receive the country we are representing or the committees we will participate in until December. This means that before then, we cover everything that will happen during the week that is not reliant on those two pieces of information. After we learned that the country we were representing was Nepal, we got to work researching everything we needed to know. The final big step was writing a position paper for your committee. Each committee has a subject, and within the subject are two topics.
“My committee was Legal, and the topic was Privacy in A.I.,” Ethan ’28 said. “I wrote a position paper full of information and stated Nepal's position on the situation.”
This position paper is a three-part essay with three sections: an introduction to your country, the history of your topic, and then your proposed solution. All of this needs to fit on one page, and it is a good base for what to talk about when you first arrive at the conference.
The first event after we arrived was the opening ceremonies. The people running the event gave a few speeches, and a former ambassador even spoke. After the opening ceremony, we had our first committee session. Each session was three hours long, and we had a total of five throughout the weekend. During these sessions, we worked with other delegates to pick and solve either topic A or B. With the end goal of submitting a resolution that ⅔ of delegates approve. If a resolution is passed, it is sent to the United Nations office in New York for review an interesting aspect of the trip.
For most of the Wooster students on the trip, it was the first conference.
“Being at my first conference for Model UN was not what I expected at all," Jack '28 said. "It was very different and more challenging than the Humanities one simulation. During the conference, you had experienced ambassadors who led the conference and their team, and newcomers like me who provided help to your team, and paid attention to what others were doing, so that one day we can lead our own team."
Wooster's three seniors in attendance: Arthur, Antonio and Sean.
There are three types of committees at the conference. A General Assembly is a very close replication of those in the United Nations. These are large committees with upwards of 150 delegates. Next is a specialized committee that may have occurred in the UN, but may be more time relevant or about an event. These committees can vary from 40 to 120 delegates. Last are the crisis committees, which can be about almost anything. This year, there were crisis committees about “Star Wars,” the MET Gala, and “The Office.”
I was able to be a part of the BP Board of Directors: Deepwater Horizon. This crisis committee was a Board of Directors meeting taking place two days after the explosion and sinking of a British Petroleum-owned deepwater oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a small committee with only 18 delegates and allowed for a completely different experience from previous years.
I have been a part of Wooster's Model UN club since my freshman year and have also been to this conference three times. It has been a great experience trying out new types of committees each year, and this year, leading the club in preparations for the trip. I have met people from all around the country and even the globe through ILMUNC. I still talk to people from Greenwich, CT, all the way to São Paulo, Brazil. This year, three seniors went to their last ILMUNC conference, and overall, ILMUNC has been a great experience.
Sean '26
Advanced Journalism Student
