How to be a Chairperson by Onur KARADAL

Being a chairperson in MUN is a professional step in your MUN career. It seems obvious if we consider what is more prestigious. Being the best delegate or selecting the best delegate? And I believe that almost every delegate (except first timers) wishes to be a chairperson. Our question to consider in this article is how can we achieve this level?

IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE

First thing I think a chairperson needs the most is to have enough experiences. I’m not going to say a certain number of experiences cause it changes conference to conference, and it’s more like a thing that you’ll understand that it’s enough after a specific conference.

So, what makes experiences this much important?

If you are going to be a chairperson, you’ll have to choose the best delegate. And the best delegate needs to be selected by someone better than best delegate. You need to know the procedure and the topic better than anyone else except your chair mates in the committee in order to make your committee’s way to success.

Thinking more basically, having more experiences will make you more professional and promising. You need to think about your image in delegates eyes not just how you handle the committee. If you have a more authoritarian image in them they will easily accept you as the director of the committee. The only way to reach this level is to have enough experiences.

FOLLOW THE CONFERENCES

A popular mistake is waiting for a proposal or an offer to be chairperson after you have more and more awards. But let me tell you one thing: MUN conferences will not ask you to be a chairperson in their conferences if you’re not a famous MUNer (which is not a thing that you can do without having a chairperson experience). So you got to get in touch with them. Ask them to be a chairperson in their conference. Not just MUN also in your future life you’ll have to scramble for a status you want to achieve. They won’t simply come to you. But get up, search for MUN’s and send messages them to be a chairperson. If you proved that you able to be a chair in your delegate days, they will already be aware of you. Send them your experiences.

Some people think this might be humiliating that you are not the first one to be asked but there is nothing wrong with this in my opinion. After chairing in more and more conferences you’ll be recognized and will be the first one to call for an academic board.

MASTER A COMMITTEE

Actually, this next one is not as big as the previous two, but a thing to stress. I’ll explain it with an example from my experiences.

There is no other committee I can handle better than DISEC both as a delegate and a chairperson. I had four awards as a delegate and three of them were in DISEC which is a clear reflection of my mastery in that committee. It was like people matched me with DISEC in their brains. So when they were looking for a chair for DISEC, I was one of the possible choices. As you can probably guess it was better and easier for me to have my first experience as a chairperson in DISEC, as already happened that way.

The main thing that I want to focus is if you master a committee it will be easier for you to step up from a delegate to a chair in that committee. My first chairperson experience would’ve been worse if it was in a committee like UNSC which is definitely not my thing instead of DISEC.

So, these are the most important things that I think a chairperson should have/be aware of. I don’t want to fill this article with the most cliche and sometimes wrong things like having good English, so many awards, contacts…

Alongside with these, there is a question that I think a person should ask himself/herself before being a chairperson.

Am I really enough to be a chairperson?

You might be familiar with this one. The thing is, when a person we know becomes a chair for the first time, we question if he/she is really capable of being a chairperson? But we never ask the same question to ourselves. So, first thing is to ask yourself, are you really capable of doing that? Do MUN conferences really need you in their academic team? Or your future delegates would be happy to have a chair like you? First, find an honest answer to those questions; later you can consider being a chairperson.

Onur KARADAL

The Writer of MUNTurkey.com