How to Win an Award in an MUN Conference by Efe COŞTU

About more than two years ago, my marvelous MUN career has been started and special thanks to MUNTurkey.com, it still continues. I could not have done it without such a perfect platform. I still remember the first day on the committee. I was the guy who just sits and does nothing at all. Because I had the fear of doing something wrong and messing up everything. Although I did my research very deeply and even prepared my speeches before the conference, I was just could not make it up. When the day of the whole session day has arrived, I just thought that I have nothing to lose, I pay money to come here, and I have to get that award. That was my last day’s motto. And as you can guess, I was awarded as Most Promising Delegate Award. It was a great success to me and it brought a lot of confidence together. So in conclusion, I will explain how to get an award in a Model United Nations Conference.

First of all, there are two main impacts that are affecting your award. We can call them internal and external factors. I will start by explaining the external factors. Basically, the things that you did before and during the conference. The first step that takes you to award is broad and deep research. No matter what your allocation is, you have to make a deep research to have a better understanding of both your country and the agenda item. I will leave some links which may be beneficial for your research. Preferably, the language of your research may depend upon the difficulty of your topic but I highly recommend researching in the official language of the conference which is mostly English. Although the official language is not English, once again, I highly recommend you to make your research in English due to the fact that you may find more articles and documents about the related issue at an academic level. Just after researching, the preparation step comes.

Once you understood the topic briefly, you can start to make sample speech examples so therefore you won’t rush to write speeches during the committee. But these samples need to be like a template or skeleton of a speech. What I mean, your ideas or speeches may differ from motion to motion. So you should not just stick to the speech that you wrote before. You have to shape your sentences, ideas, speeches. Unfortunately, it is not enough to know an enormous amount of knowledge. Respect and being constructive are side factors that are crucially important. Believe it or not, being respectful to everyone and every time creates a good profile in everyone’s mind, which again makes your path to the road of an award.

In addition to that, being constructive is also mattered a lot. What is meant by being constructive is, willing to improve but not win basically? Your reason for being at the MUN conference is trying to solve a problem. It is not a debate competition, so do not try to win an argument, just try to find sensible and possible solution ideas.

Secondly, the other factor that has an influence on your road to award is internal factors which are the thoughts that are going on your mind. Assuming you that you did your preparation well, but you have issues with being confident. That is a very easy problem to get over and once you got over with these problems, there are no more reasons not to be the best delegate. As I have mentioned above, I also had confidence problems but I managed to get over from them which means everyone can.

Firstly, you have to believe that nothing will happen if you make a fault in your speech. Of course, you have to be extra careful while entertaining your speech to get an award. Everyone can make mistakes but mistakes will teach you to great lessons and once you correct your mistake, you will not do the same mistake again. So there is nothing to fear about in MUN conferences.

Once you got over from this problem, try to contribute to the debate as much as you can. Try to give motions and give speeches on every single motion. With respect to my experiences of chairing, if you contribute to the committee, show yourself and apply every single step that I mentioned above, there is no reason for you to not reach your goals.

In conclusion, the harmony of good research and a considerable amount of speeches draws your line to the award. I hope I expressed myself clearly. I sincerely hope you will take benefit from this article and if you have something to ask me, please feel free to send a message! Thanks.

Efe COŞTU

The Writer of MUNTurkey.com