Junior Victoria Hou stands at the front of room 15, holding forth on such topics as lethal weapons, ISIS, and the gender gap. The Model United Nations club, created this year by Hou and supervised by social studies teacher Janine Sohn, is facing these topics and more as well as attending conferences to discuss and debate them.

Hou said that she was inspired to create the club over the summer.

“The idea came to me when I was in summer school,” Hou said. “There was a summer program called World Affairs Council in San Francisco and some of my peers told me about this club called Model United Nations that they had at their school. I thought it would be really cool to bring it to our school.”

Sohn does not lead the club and said that she has taken a backseat to the student leaders.

“All the club activities are directed by the students,” Sohn said. “In a lot of ways, Victoria has taken the helm of Model UN.”

The club attends conferences that intend to simulate a Model United Nations meeting. The club is assigned a country to represent at the conference and each member is assigned a different committee to sit on.

“The sessions are actually pretty similar to the real sessions,” Hou said. “The whole point of Model UN is to simulate meetings as accurately as possible.”

To this end, the members of the club spend the weeks before the conference discussing the relevant issues that pertain to their country and how their desires will interact with those of other countries.

Hou compared the club to Mock Trial as well as Speech and Debate, saying that although the three may utilise similar skills, they all have inherently different goals.

“Although  we may incorporate skills that Mock Trial or Debate use, such as critical thinking and presentation skills, at the core of Model United Nations is a desire to get to the heart of a problem and find solutions for it,” Hou said. “With Model UN, you’re trying to achieve your country’s goals and solve problems at the same time.”

Junior Halley Wolin said she enjoys the club because of the valuable discussion it brings.

“I really like the aspect that everyone gets to take on a country that they don’t normally know about,” Wolin said. “A lot of people don’t know the basic issues, and the club allows us to work on and learn about these issues.”

Junior Danny DeBare said the club was valuable for how it much it taught its members.

“After just spending six hours in a Model United Nations environment, I gained so much knowledge,” DeBare said. “Not just about the Model UN but also about the United Nations itself and how it works”.

Hou agreed, saying that she enjoyed how the format incorporates current events.

“We pride ourselves on actually discussing issues that are relevant,” Hou said. “We actually attended a committee not too long ago, directly after the 16 sustainable development goals were passed, and it was really interesting to see how that current issue went directly into our committee session.”

Hou said she wants the members of the club to be able to look at issues from all sides.

“The value of Model UN is negotiation and taking all issues into account as well as taking the information and creating a solution that anyone can benefit from,” Hou said. “The heart of MUN is negotiation and diplomacy.”

Sohn agreed, and said that she appreciated the mindfulness of compromise the conferences brought.

“I  think it’s a great way for them to see diplomacy in action,” Sohn said. “Everything in the world is compromise There’s the element of awareness that there has to be some sort of common agreement.”