FSMUN 7.0 – Under Sec Gen (Experience)

Fountainhead School Model United Nations is an event I look forward to since my MYP years and organizing it was one of my main goals to achieve in DP. That’s why I filled the form of the core committee of the MUN as soon as I received the notification! I was so excited about organizing it and even though I knew owing to the pandemic, it would be an online event, I was still very thrilled to receive the email of confirmation as the Under-Secretary-General for the 7th edition of MUN. This role came with loads of responsibilities and tasks which required a lot of patience, determination, and hard work.

LO 1: Identify their own strengths and develop areas for personal growth.

As the USG for Finance and marketing, I was responsible for collecting confirmations of participation, handling the payments, and making sure the marketing of the event was effective. Now I had already done the fellowship so I had a little taste of social media marketing and social media was our main portal for marketing given the event happening virtually amidst an active pandemic. So focusing all the resources towards social media marketing while also helping the team make an interactive and visually appealing main website for the event where all the details, registration forms, study guides, etc would be available. While working on these tasks, I discovered my strength in persuading and communicating with people for different purposes. Not only in the core team but with parents, potential delegates, and chairs, I was tasked to handle all communications with them and I think I did a very good job at that. Convincing people to register, selling the idea to first-timers, and communicating with the executive board was something that I thoroughly enjoyed throughout the event and planning. This made me realize my potential in mass and individual interaction and made me feel more confident in talking to people. Another identification was of my organization and time management skills which were praised by my teachers in-charge and also my peers for always getting things done right and on/before time.

LO 5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively.

Although my task involved a lot of grunt work, I reluctantly did it to ensure the smooth sailing of the event and in the end, it was all worth it. One thing I realized while working with my team though was that I might not be able to do all the tasks by myself all the time and relying on them for help is not a sign of weakness but it demonstrates good team spirit. So when I was not able to complete certain tasks like payment confirmation emails, I asked my peers for help and they were glad to lend a hand because they knew I would and in fact did the same for them. As mentioned earlier, a lot of grunt work was part of my roles like individual mail communication with all delegates and their parents, designing new posts for the feed every week, even making study guides for the committees! All of this while simultaneously handling the pressure of the upcoming term 1 exam and summatives/formatives almost at least once a week.

LO 2: Demonstrate that they have undertaken challenges, developing new skills in the process.

Juggling all these tasks at once was a little difficult and the biggest challenge for this project. But having done most of my projects, fellowship and internships online throughout last year gave me an upper hand to handle these simultaneous tasks which in turn increased my organizational and time management skills. Similar to monsoon musings, we did the MUN on zoom, and communication was done with the IT team to make sure of the technical difficulties being curbed on the event day. And thankfully no major glitches occurred on the event weekend. The project overall gave me an opportunity to collaborate with peoples of different backgrounds with their own strengths and weaknesses and that diversity helped make working on the event so much more enlightening and fun at the same time because I was learning new things about different aspects such as Making a website or writing formal mails or designing an invitation and basically all the other handiwork attached with planning and MUN. This for sure helped me work on my collaboration skills and taught me that patience and being a good listener are keys to good communication within a team because you’re always unable to expect things to go as you planned them to and taking input from others can actually contribute to making things better.

LO 3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience.

This was a completely student LED project, organized by the core committee of four members including me and three other students of 10th and 11th grade of my school. We did have a few teacher supervisors who made sure we were on task and helped us through the planning, but the onus of work was all on us in that is why it was that much more important for all of us to work together and make the event a success especially because this was the first time FUN and was taking place virtually so the stakes were a little bit higher as the job was a little more difficult. Also, this is what made the requirement for commitment and perseverance even higher as this was a project including people not only from my school but delegates from other schools even other cities in India. Plus the executive board was from Different cities and we had to show them that FSMUN is an event that they must be honored to chair. we didn’t even hire a helping committee this time to add us through the event because the main function of that team would be during a physical event in setting up everything and doing the grunt work but this time due to the nature of the event we decided that the four of us with enough dedication and hard work should be able to to do that job ourselves and not require the additional help of others so the workload multi-folded due to this decision and required multiple hours every week to be dedicated solely to the planning and organizing of this event. And also because it was just the four of us, internal Communications and bonding were strengthened as well throughout the process of planning and a new friendship was developed within us. that is how I know our collaboration was effective and we made the right call not to hire the committee to do the additional work because otherwise, we would not have developed the crucial organizational and self-management skills that we date and we would not have got to work as closely as we did for the success of the event.

LO 4: Show commitment and perseverance in their CAS experience.

This time we plan on increasing the number of first timers who participated in the event because we wanted our juniors to be exposed to the idea of Model United Nations during their early MYP itself so they can be better prepared to participate or chair or even organize the event once they reach DP. This was a fairly difficult task as anyone was a foreign concept to almost all the 7/8th graders and convincing them to pay for experiencing it for the first time took a little harder effort than I thought. But at the end of the day, a lot of first-time owners participated in the event and after the week we got a lot of feedback from parents and students saying how helpful and funded the first time was and how much they were looking forward to it next year as well. So seeing the enthusiasm in my juniors was a big measure of the success of FSMUN and made the two very tiring and difficult 2 months of planning the event absolutely worth it. Search initiatives helped me understand the hard work that goes into organizing the events in school and outside that I participate in and I have no respect for the people who are behind the planning of such events. FSMUN is an annual ritual of my school and getting to contribute to planning it was a great honor for me E and I hope that the enthusiasm that I saw in my juniors Persevere and one day probably help them organize this on a grander scale.

Evidences :

(i)Secretariat Committee announcement mail