Model UN team excels at Empire Conference

By Naischa Puri ‘23

Starting on November 17 and continuing through the weekend, six W+H Model UN Club members attended the Empire Model UN Conference at New York University and rocked it! These members were Annie Gu ’23 (Club President), Aastha Patel ’23 (Club Vice President), Andrew Wolff ’23 (Club Treasurer), David Ezra Flatau-Jones ‘23 (Club Secretary), Raiya Patel ‘24 (Club Member), Tanya Chowdary ‘24 (Club Member) along with club advisor Mr. Cristian Fernandez.

This was the ninth annual conference hosted by NYU, coming after years of the pandemic preventing in-person conferences. The event is run entirely by undergraduate students and “aims to bring together over 400 high school students from across the world to New York University and discuss a variety of issues,” according to their website.

One of the W+H ambassadors, Annie Gu, was part of the AD HOC Committee, where the topic being argued is not revealed until shortly before the conference; Gu represented a fictional Vice President of Security called “Pacino” and argued for leadership of an energy company in an alternate universe after the CEO had passed away.

“This is the first time that W+H’s MUN team has been able to put up a performance like this, and it was so exciting but also rewarding to see our hard work pay off,” Gu said.

Tanya Chowdary worked in DISEC (Disarmament and International Security Committee) representing Thailand and developing solutions for organized crime around the world.

Also representing Thailand, Raiya Patel discussed the pharmaceutical market on the international and domestic levels in the General Assembly committee WHO (World Health Organization).

Along with Gu, three other delegates participated in the General Crisis branch of the conferences, where students were given backgrounds of certain characters and provided arguments from those particular perspectives.

In the Hawaiian Kingdom, two of our delegates role-played members of a Hawaiian community arguing the presence of the monarchy: Andrew Wolff as Kini Kapahu Wilson, a cultural ambassador and advocate for natives, along with Aastha Patel as Geraldine Adamson Swill, a prominent merchant. Within the Congregation of Philosophers, David Ezra Flatau-Jones argued from the mindset of Indian lawyer and peacemaker Mahatma Gandhi, debating against the incorporation of military policing in a worldwide government. Flatau-Jones said, “It was very challenging, but we all did really well, and I had an amazing time.”

The four-day conference was a massive success for the W+H delegates who came back with six awards, five of those individually: Honorable Mention received by Flatau-Jones, Outstanding Delegate received by Raiya Patel and Wolff, Best Delegate received by Gu and Aastha Patel. As a group, the W+H team earned the Best Small Delegation award, marking an exciting and rewarding return to in-person conferences for our Model UN Club.

“It was super rewarding to get in-person experience after a few years of virtual competition, and it was even more rewarding to win,” Aastha said of the experience. Beyond the conference itself, traveling together into the city allowed the team to strengthen their relationship as a team. “We also got to bond as a delegation by exploring new restaurants and figuring out the subway together,” she continued.