Traveling Team
The 2009 Montana
Model UN team in the
General Assembly chambers at UN Headquarters.
The Montana Model UN (MMUN) Travelling Team travels to national conferences to compete with other collegiate Model UN teams. In recent years, the team has attended conferences at Harvard University and in Chicago, Berkeley, and New York.
Team members are chosen from the fall semester course that plans and staffs the Montana Model UN High School Conference.
In Spring 2009, a twelve-member team attended the week-long collegiate National Model UN (NMUN) conference in New York, NY. The Team represented Iceland and won two awards: Distinguished Delegation (top 25% of the 190 countries represented at the conference) and Position Paper (top 10%). The students met Iceland's ambassador to the UN, attended talks by leading international scholars and policy makers, and attended opening and closing ceremonies at UN headquarters.
This was the fourth time the MMUN Team has attended this large international conference and the second time it has won an award. In Spring 2008, the Team was named an Honorable Delegation (top 50%) for its representation of Thailand.
Because MMUN Team members serve as chairs and other staff members at the MMUN High School Conference each fall, they are often selected to serve as committee staff at NMUN. In 2009, Aimee Ryan chaired the Security Council, David Shelton chaired the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and Robert Cahill served as the rapporteur for the General Assembly Second Committee.
Several MMUN alumni remain involved with the NMUN conference. In 2009, Jennifer Hathaway Spauding, who earned her master’s degree in political science from UM in 2006, served as secretary-general, the highest staff position. UM graduates and former MMUN members Rob Killian, Paul Moe and Lindsay Erickson served as committee directors and assistant directors.
The National Model United Nations conference is the largest collegiate UN conference in the world, drawing over 3,000 students from 250 schools and five continents.
For information on NMUN, please visit http://nmun.org/.