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Canada International Model United Nations

Under-Secretary-General, Specialized Agencies

Grades 11–12

North America's largest youth-led MUN conference: 1,700 attendees from more than ten countries.

Having spent four years trying to get students into these rooms, I wanted to help build the room itself. It is a different responsibility. At the club level you are advocating for a handful of students you know by name; on a Secretariat you are setting the conditions for 1,700 you will never meet, most of whom will judge the whole activity by whether their first committee went well.

As Under-Secretary-General I sit on the Secretariat as a substantive member, responsible for the delivery of every specialized agency across the conference — topics, background guides, and the quality of debate inside each room.

I train and oversee more than sixty staff, most of them high school students taking on real responsibility for the first time. A good portion of the job is writing instructions clear enough that nobody has to guess, and then being reachable when they guess anyway.

Running an event this size taught me that clarity given early is worth more than heroics later. Almost every crisis I have watched at a conference traces back to something that could have been written down a month earlier by someone who assumed it was obvious.

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