I plan on joining the model united nations club next school year and what can I do to prepare for it because I have never joined a club and never participated in anything like MUN. So what can I do to prepare? Thanks!
Debate, LD:
-Practice spreading/speaking 30 minutes a day, look up speaking drills LD debate for help, ik Princeton has some
-Read philosophy books, very helpful
That is all you need, an abstract mind and a quick mouth is perfect.
I do congressional debate. At practice we hold mock debates with our research and simulate our tournaments
MUN:
-Keep up with world politics and know the basic alliances between countries. Seriously. At my last conference, where I was the US, I accidentally wrote a resolution with Iran and realized it later; thankfully, I didn’t get any points off for being off-policy because I had also been working with the UK and France, whom the US is very much allies with.
-Search up how to write a position paper. Seriously. I’ve been partnered with people who didn’t know how to write a formal paper of any sort, so I had to rewrite their whole thing. It was really bad. I didn’t like either of those partners.
-Make sure you can speak off the top of your head with only a few notes. You should be able to articulate your thoughts to some extent.
-When doing research for your committee and topic, go very, very in-depth. It’s really annoying when you have to pretend that you know what an acronym stands for or what a certain type of loan is. Research everything. You’ll get better and better at this each conference.
-BE CONFIDENT. Seriously, even if your speech is full of BS, if you sound confident, you can win an award.
Honestly, your school’s MUN club should teach you most of this. Don’t stress. For your first conference, don’t stress; you aren’t expected to win anything.
Debate, Public Forum:
(honestly I ditched debate for MUN and bc timing issues so I don’t remember much but yeah)
-Again, do extensive research on your topics. Time all your speeches beforehand, and make a separate speech (or at least cut down on your original) for when you have an inexperienced parent judge; they’ll give more points to bad speakers if they speak slowly (seriously, it’s happened to me–my team lost against the worst team we had ever seen; the first speaker couldn’t even get through half of her points).
-Make rebuttal arguments for every point in each of your paper, and then make rebuttals against your rebuttals so you know what to say back in cross-ex and other stuff.
Again, your school’s club should teach you all of this and more (my pufo days are behind me).