The team won the Golden Eagle award at the Georgia Southern University Model UN competition in January and was named Outstanding School. They also received top honors at a competition in February at the University of Georgia.
The students were successful despite a long list of hurdles this year because of pandemic precautions, said the team’s advisor Mary Henning.
“I’m so proud of them because every obstacle that was put in their way they overcame,” she said. “They overcame not being able to sit next to each other in our meetings and having to sit six feet apart, they overcame not getting our countries until the last minute. They overcame the technological aspect where they had to learn how to go in and out of Zoom rooms for this competition, which is a lot different from what we’ve done in the past.”
The Model UN team at Glynn Academy has about 50 members, which Henning said were too many to hold practices in a classroom this school year. To allow for social distancing, they moved their weekly meetings to the school’s auditorium, where the students sat two seats apart and got plenty of practice projecting their voices across distances and through face masks.
“A lot of Model UN is speaking and debating, so it was of course more challenging to do with masks on,” Henning said.
In-person competitions are normally three-day affairs that involve traveling to Statesboro or Athens, spending nights in a hotel and 12 hours a day at the contest.
“We usually go Thursday, Friday and Saturday,” Henning said. “We take a bus, and we go to Statesboro. We stay overnight at a hotel, and we have big pizza parties and all that, play games and stuff. And we didn’t get to do that this year.”
The competition was instead held in a virtual format, with students putting on their professional attire and logging in from computers at home.
“It was a very different kind of conference for us,” Henning said. “Some students liked it. They liked being online. They felt like it didn’t affect their performance at all. But others students are better in person because you have to negotiate with other people.”
The team practiced virtually ahead of time, to get the feel for the Model UN experience over Zoom.
“Some of the committees had a lot of people, so you had to keep your microphone muted unless you were speaking,” Henning said. “And we had to practice how to do breakout rooms.”
Committees would break into small groups to discuss resolutions, so Henning practiced that process with the students. She also secured school Chromebooks to loan to some students who did not have the technology they’d need at home.
The students began to prepare for the competitions in August, although they didn’t know until just before the winter break if the competitions would take place this school year.
“It was like right before Christmas we got our countries,” Henning said. “… People worked over Christmas vacation, worked on getting up to speed on their countries.”
Model UN participants are expected to know their assigned countries’ positions on a wide variety of issues, like human trafficking, global warming and cyber warfare. All topics could possibly come up during debates at competitions.
“So then they spent Christmas looking stuff up, writing stuff out, and after we came back from Christmas that was the big push,” Henning said. “All during January at our meetings, people would get up and read their practice resolutions that they had written on the topics that were going to be addressed at the conference, so that they were ready to go. There’s a lot of work that goes into it.”
Their hard work paid off, though, Henning said, and maybe next year the competitions will look a bit more normal.
“We’re hoping to be back in person next year, but we’ll just have to wait and see,” she said.
At the Georgia Southern contest, Glynn Academy also swept all four committees by having a participant win the highest award of “outstanding” delegate: Ellie Watkins, Caroling Lokey, Maggie Jenkins and Avery Wilson each took home the highest award and were chosen to join the Georgia Southern team when they compete in the National Model UN conference in New York.
Several other students won “distinguished” awards — Ryan Walsh, PJ Albenice, Dahlia Darazim, Corinne Hill, and Collin Young.
Earning “honorable mention” awards were Alex Cheong, Suzy Meyer, Annika Buchli, Griffin Lee, Caitlin Tigani, Maria Barr and Ares Ellis.
At the UGA competition, several students were recognized for their performance. Collin Young, Maggie Jenkins and Corinne Hill received “outstanding” awards, the top honor. “Distinguished” awards were given to PJ Albenice, Aidan Schaefer, Alex Kaercher and Ryan Walsh, and “honorable mention” awards went to Thomas Mitchell, Emma Williams and Trinity Cooper.