JHUMUNC prepares for largest conference yet

The seventeenth annual Johns Hopkins University Model United Nations Conference (JHUMUNC) is set to start next week on Feb. 6. The 162 undergraduate staff members of the conference are gearing up to host the largest batch of high school students yet, with a total of 2,079 students registered to attend.

“This year we have a record-shattering number of participants registered for JHUMUNC,” junior Ian Hooley, who is serving as one of this year’s secretaries general alongside senior Kithmina Hewage, wrote in an e-mail to The News-Letter. Part of the reason for this increase is that the conference’s organizers have added two committees to its roster.

“We always deal with some attrition due to weather and other factors outside of our control, so this is by no means the number of people that will actually show up, but this is how many participants we have registered,” Hooley wrote.

This year, the amount of people who have registered is so high that the conference is being moved to a different hotel to accommodate the larger group.

“The Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel by Marriott was great and treated us very well, but we outgrew them and decided to move to the Hilton,” Hewage wrote in an e-mail to The News-Letter.

The secretaries general expressed their excitement for the new space, noting the increased square footage to conduct committees and social events.

“Their sixty-thousand plus square feet of event space will be reserved exclusively for us throughout JHUMUNC, and the majority of the hotel will be occupied by JHUMUNC participants and staff,” Hooley said.

But even with the larger space, the conference still had more high schools attempting to register than available space. Schools that registered late were put on a waitlist. However, Hewage noted that the conference staff has already had to turn down many of those schools on the waitlist.

The schools that were able to get a spot at the conference, on the other hand, come from all over the world.

“We have schools coming from as far north as Maine and as far west as Texas. We have international schools from Canada, Sri Lanka, China and Haiti,” junior Leah Barresi, director of school relations, wrote in an e-mail to The News-Letter.

Each year the conference features several specialized committees that involve a particular time period or a specific issue or crisis. At this year’s conference, three such committees will run.

Of these specialized committees, the FIFA committee has gained a lot of popularity among the JHUMUNC staff. In this committee, delegates will be representing countries competing to host the next FIFA World Cup.

Another specialized committee planned for this year’s JHUMUNC conference will bring students to 12th century Japan as they simulate the foreign relations of four different clans. Furthermore, each year, JHUMUNC hosts a Joint Crisis committee, in which two committees compete with one another. The two committees at this year’s conference will model the Syrian government headed by Bashar al-Assad and the opposition Syrian National Coalition.

The conference also annually gives students a chance to model real United Nations committees in addition to the fictional, specialized ones.

“Our more traditional committees include the subsidiary organs of the UN General Assembly and committees in the Economic and Social Council. The Secretariat of JHUMUNC has worked exceedingly hard to create committees that are intellectually stimulating and relevant to current affairs,” Kithmina wrote.

Over the past years, the conference has grown in prestige as well as size, according to the secretaries general.

“Since I first got involved, JHUMUNC has grown in size as well as in number of registered participants, which has been really fun to see evolve. The conference has also grown in terms of its reputation, with it now being one of the most highly-weighted conferences used to determine high schools’ MUN team rankings by bestdelegate.com,” Hooley wrote.

Many of JHUMUNC’s organizers have been involved in the club throughout their undergraduate careers and said they were glad the conference was growing.

“Our predecessors [who organized the conference previously] have worked extremely hard to establish the conference as a mainstay in the high school Model UN circuit, and the growth in numbers speaks volumes to how much has been achieved during a short time,” Hewage wrote.