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Embodying the role of Secretary-General of the Yale Model United Nations 35th Annual Session (XXXV) = my life for the past 12 months.
I've been doing Model UN for 9 years...man i'm old! The reason i've done MUN for soo long is because of the life-skills it has taught me and allowed me to practice: problem solving, decision making as part of a team, presentation and public speaking, negotiation, and most importantly working with others who share astronomically different points of view from me in a constructive way. These are skills I am beginning to appreciate outside MUN now more than ever, having been through a very ROUGH summer job search, and coming out on the other end with offers I am very proud of because of my ability to problem solve, work with teams...McKinsey and JP Morgan seem to like these skills :-)
Quick background: I began my journey with MUN all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on the East and Central Africa circuit during middle-school and junior high (E.A.M.U.N). I moved onto the European circuit in senior high and amongst other conferences attended the largest MUN conference in the world - The Hague International Model United Nations (THIMUN). THIMUN 2005 was held right across the street from the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, so I got to see Slobodan Milosevic on trail. What an experience. Now, I feel really lucky to be a member of (plausibly) the top Model UN team in the USA - MUNTY, Yale's traveling MUN team.
For all my MUN experience, nothing could have prepared me to be the Secretary-General of YMUN XXXV, work very closely with the YMUN dream team for 9 months, optimize a 6-figure budget, manage 140 Yale staffers, and lead the experience formation for 1,200 highschool delegates from around the world...
Photo of Yale taken by YMUN XXXV delegate Halle Murdoch. Fun fact: YMUN is held entirely on Yale's gothic style campus, one of the few MUN conferences of its size and calibre in the world held on a college campus.
1) Surround yourself with people smarter than you, and never underestimate the power of a strong team.
Being at Yale has taught me many things. But the life lesson that has made the biggest difference to how I approach life, is understanding that there will always be people out there smarter than me, faster than me, (insert comparative) than me. Its proven :-)
Nonetheless, there are two ways to interpret this knowledge: try and refute it by spending my time trying to out-wit other people at their best game. Or view the gap between myself and others as a learning experience and being intelligent enough to build a team of people around me who pushed and challenged me to think outside the box, and provided the best sound-board for my ideas ever. With YMUN XXXV, I chose the latter option, from the word go in selecting my Director's-General Ferny and Drew. I selected them for their knowledge in admin/logistics and PR with staff that I simply did not have. By building the entire secretariat (the core planning group, comprised of 8 people excluding myself, Ferny + Drew) in this way, we built a dream team. I kid you not.
The next step once I had surrounded myself with a strong team and knew that collectively we would get the job done well, was to begin investing into the next group of people who would run YMUN the "next generation" if you will. Bill Clinton began his preparation to become President of the US 20 years before he first ran, its never to early to start. YMUN XXXV would need to lead to a YMUN XXXVI, and the only way I could do my part to set-up for YMUN XXXVI, was to keep all the secretariat members vested in the conference, and have them really feel like their work and time was valued in creating YMUN. By bringing on freshmen as Assistant Secretary-Generals and keeping them involved with major decision making pre-conference, and then hands-on tasks during the conference, I was able to use the entire potential of the YMUN planning group, and tap into all our resources as a team as best as I could.
This is my mantra to life => view everything as a learning experience, and no matter what else happens, your always a winner.If you've done your homework and make every effort to apply it in a constructive way, it pays off. My biggest homework assignment as Sec-Gen this year was to find ways to make YMUN a great learning experience. I applied it by introducing PB Wiki forums to facilitate pre-conference interactions, this year position papers were mandatory for all attending delegates, and chairs were given much more freedom to form dais teams and carry forth their creative vision for their committees. The proof that it worked out - the YMUN 2009 facebook group was started by a delegate, and the incredible response from fellow delegates setting up individual committee pages, sharing their experiences, how much they learned and how excited they are to come back next year, like literally brought tears to my eyes. And I don't cry that often, except during RomComs like Love Actually.
Which leads to my second point.
ii) With every decision you make, you must be accountable to yourself and be able to justify why you made that decision to the rest of the team. It is impossible to do this without knowing your stuff. Like actually impossible. Without working 40hrs a week at times on YMUN, I would not have been able to confidently back-up my reasoning to expand the conference by 10% (more diversity recruiting from local and public schools), increase recruitment of international students to get 1/5 of the conference attendance from non-US schools (to truly globalize YMUN), or why better staff and delegate engagement pre-conference was essential (to give YMUN XXXV that x-factor that comes from having people work together as a well bonded team).
Why is any of this important?
One of my main goals as Sec-Gen, was to ensure that at 20% of conference membership was from non-US schools, to create a truly global learning environment for international relations. We ended up with 18% of our conference participation as international students from 4 continents - Asia, South America, Europe and North America. Seeking out an environment where you know you will look, talk, act and think differently from many of those around you is such a powerful act. As human beings, we can only further our thinking by getting out of our comfort zones and analyzing situations from different perspectives. Now without getting all "metaphysical" on you, its very hard to put yourself if someone else's shoes and see things from their perspective without having meaningful interactions with them and getting an insight into why they think the way they do. YMUN XXXV was the perfect environment for this to happen, and proves how basic the concept of diversity is to running a successful conference.
Alex Klein...SOCHUM. Can you see what is going on behind him? Yes, it is superlatives!
Its been an phenomenal ride over the past year. I now hold the title of former Sec-Gen, but YMUN has been a huge part of my life, and the lessons learned I'm keeping with me forever.
See you at YMUN XXXVI...I'm running Security, so beware :-)
Quick background: I began my journey with MUN all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on the East and Central Africa circuit during middle-school and junior high (E.A.M.U.N). I moved onto the European circuit in senior high and amongst other conferences attended the largest MUN conference in the world - The Hague International Model United Nations (THIMUN). THIMUN 2005 was held right across the street from the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, so I got to see Slobodan Milosevic on trail. What an experience. Now, I feel really lucky to be a member of (plausibly) the top Model UN team in the USA - MUNTY, Yale's traveling MUN team.
For all my MUN experience, nothing could have prepared me to be the Secretary-General of YMUN XXXV, work very closely with the YMUN dream team for 9 months, optimize a 6-figure budget, manage 140 Yale staffers, and lead the experience formation for 1,200 highschool delegates from around the world...
Its therefore only fitting that embarking on this very different Sec-Gen journey, I would learn a new set of life-lessons and life-skills. I was without a doubt super excited to have made it through the grueling selection process in February 2008. But a week into the role when I had to sign a hotel contract with the Omni Hotel that had a potential liability of $100,000's without a record of a contract signed the previous year, the reality of being Sec-Gen dawned on me. I had a crap-load to learn about running a global conference AND very fast, because the buck stopped at me. If something went wrong, I'd be the last port of call on what to do to fix it. More terrifying even - if I made a little mistake, it had the potential to affect 1,000's of people, and I would have myself to answer to. Turns out that I did make mistakes, many of them. But I lived, and advisors said YMUN XXXV was their best conference in 15yrs! So I am here to share some of my thoughts with you. Hopefully you will find some of my ramblings helpful, some entertaining, some even illuminating :-)
Photo of Yale taken by YMUN XXXV delegate Halle Murdoch. Fun fact: YMUN is held entirely on Yale's gothic style campus, one of the few MUN conferences of its size and calibre in the world held on a college campus.
1) Surround yourself with people smarter than you, and never underestimate the power of a strong team.
Being at Yale has taught me many things. But the life lesson that has made the biggest difference to how I approach life, is understanding that there will always be people out there smarter than me, faster than me, (insert comparative) than me. Its proven :-)
Nonetheless, there are two ways to interpret this knowledge: try and refute it by spending my time trying to out-wit other people at their best game. Or view the gap between myself and others as a learning experience and being intelligent enough to build a team of people around me who pushed and challenged me to think outside the box, and provided the best sound-board for my ideas ever. With YMUN XXXV, I chose the latter option, from the word go in selecting my Director's-General Ferny and Drew. I selected them for their knowledge in admin/logistics and PR with staff that I simply did not have. By building the entire secretariat (the core planning group, comprised of 8 people excluding myself, Ferny + Drew) in this way, we built a dream team. I kid you not.
The next step once I had surrounded myself with a strong team and knew that collectively we would get the job done well, was to begin investing into the next group of people who would run YMUN the "next generation" if you will. Bill Clinton began his preparation to become President of the US 20 years before he first ran, its never to early to start. YMUN XXXV would need to lead to a YMUN XXXVI, and the only way I could do my part to set-up for YMUN XXXVI, was to keep all the secretariat members vested in the conference, and have them really feel like their work and time was valued in creating YMUN. By bringing on freshmen as Assistant Secretary-Generals and keeping them involved with major decision making pre-conference, and then hands-on tasks during the conference, I was able to use the entire potential of the YMUN planning group, and tap into all our resources as a team as best as I could.
2) There is no substitute for good preparation and knowing your-ish. None.
There is a joke on the College MUN circuit that MUN-ers are amongst the best BS-ers out there. If you did/are doing the IB you know exactly what I mean, IB therefore IBS...TOK essay anyone???. Sometimes, I concede, this is true. I have seen/experienced instances where a mal-researched delegate can come into a committee, all charisma, hot air and swagga, and walk away with an award, leaving all the kids with their binders and binders of research wondering what happened. But running YMUN raised two really important issues for me:
i) The emphasis on awards and criteria that is not adequately spelled out is leading to the activity of MUN becoming a mere debating competition. Only you as a delegate truly know how much preparation you put into a committee, and only you know how much you applied that knowledge during a committee. To this end, I made every effort to set the stage for YMUN as the conference on the circuit that provides the most stimulating environment for learning about international relations in the U.S. It is my hope that every single delegate left the conference with much more knowledge about their topic area than they could imagine, and loved committee for the people who they were learning this information from - everyone around them as fellow delegates and dais teams (the staff who chair and moderate proceedings) too.
There is a joke on the College MUN circuit that MUN-ers are amongst the best BS-ers out there. If you did/are doing the IB you know exactly what I mean, IB therefore IBS...TOK essay anyone???. Sometimes, I concede, this is true. I have seen/experienced instances where a mal-researched delegate can come into a committee, all charisma, hot air and swagga, and walk away with an award, leaving all the kids with their binders and binders of research wondering what happened. But running YMUN raised two really important issues for me:
i) The emphasis on awards and criteria that is not adequately spelled out is leading to the activity of MUN becoming a mere debating competition. Only you as a delegate truly know how much preparation you put into a committee, and only you know how much you applied that knowledge during a committee. To this end, I made every effort to set the stage for YMUN as the conference on the circuit that provides the most stimulating environment for learning about international relations in the U.S. It is my hope that every single delegate left the conference with much more knowledge about their topic area than they could imagine, and loved committee for the people who they were learning this information from - everyone around them as fellow delegates and dais teams (the staff who chair and moderate proceedings) too.
This is my mantra to life => view everything as a learning experience, and no matter what else happens, your always a winner.If you've done your homework and make every effort to apply it in a constructive way, it pays off. My biggest homework assignment as Sec-Gen this year was to find ways to make YMUN a great learning experience. I applied it by introducing PB Wiki forums to facilitate pre-conference interactions, this year position papers were mandatory for all attending delegates, and chairs were given much more freedom to form dais teams and carry forth their creative vision for their committees. The proof that it worked out - the YMUN 2009 facebook group was started by a delegate, and the incredible response from fellow delegates setting up individual committee pages, sharing their experiences, how much they learned and how excited they are to come back next year, like literally brought tears to my eyes. And I don't cry that often, except during RomComs like Love Actually.
Which leads to my second point.
ii) With every decision you make, you must be accountable to yourself and be able to justify why you made that decision to the rest of the team. It is impossible to do this without knowing your stuff. Like actually impossible. Without working 40hrs a week at times on YMUN, I would not have been able to confidently back-up my reasoning to expand the conference by 10% (more diversity recruiting from local and public schools), increase recruitment of international students to get 1/5 of the conference attendance from non-US schools (to truly globalize YMUN), or why better staff and delegate engagement pre-conference was essential (to give YMUN XXXV that x-factor that comes from having people work together as a well bonded team).
Why is any of this important?
Part of the reason we are in the mess we are with the current economy, and the Dow Jones is down 25% already this year (i.e. basically the stock market has gone to the crapper and Citi Bank's shares - i.e. small pieces of the company that individuals can buy to make them money are worth less than an item in the dollar store) is because the leaders of the biggest operations on the Street did not do their homework and did not know what they doing investing in credit default swaps and mortgage backed securities. As a result they have not been able to be accountable to stockholders, let alone themselves. But I digress...
3) Diversity of ideas and people is elementary to success
As an international student at Yale, the idea of diversity on the level of ideas and of people is an issue I am always trying to approach from a variety of directions. Too often, these thoughts are prompted when cultural differences between people are highlighted. But I tried to pre-empt this at YMUN, and get delegates to interact without regard to cultural differences as the primary reason to communicate. If China and Venezuela could get together after committee to discuss this awesome idea they had to increase social welfare in their respective nations - great. If they could get together to simply talk about life and being a senior in highschool- even better.
The chairs and staff of SPECPOL B. This committee had the highest proportion of international students present...
One of my main goals as Sec-Gen, was to ensure that at 20% of conference membership was from non-US schools, to create a truly global learning environment for international relations. We ended up with 18% of our conference participation as international students from 4 continents - Asia, South America, Europe and North America. Seeking out an environment where you know you will look, talk, act and think differently from many of those around you is such a powerful act. As human beings, we can only further our thinking by getting out of our comfort zones and analyzing situations from different perspectives. Now without getting all "metaphysical" on you, its very hard to put yourself if someone else's shoes and see things from their perspective without having meaningful interactions with them and getting an insight into why they think the way they do. YMUN XXXV was the perfect environment for this to happen, and proves how basic the concept of diversity is to running a successful conference.
4) No matter how powerful you are (or think you are), sh*t happens and there will be events out of your control.
I am a self-professed OCD-er. I am obsessive compulsive about very many things - I can't go to bed without shutting cupboard doors and leaving my desk perfectly arranged with my bag packed for the next day. I can't stand unfolded laundry and fold random people's laundry in the laundry room when I'm down there. I draw lines on envelopes before I write addresses. I spend 1hr at the end of the day making my to do list for the next day...okay, I will stop now.
However the nature of the Sec-Gen role is that while it is YOUR job to keep track of all these tiny details and create the bigger picture for the entire team to see at the same time, you can only micro-manage things the way YOU like them done for so long. It is impossible to pull off such a big operation without the support of your dream team. You have to trust the people you pick to work with you to do the necessary. And this means many a time, having processes run very differently from how you envisioned them: I set a goal to have topic papers all online before Halloween, didn't happen. I was set on having advisors do Security shift at night, didn't happen. I was not planning on having an advisor threaten to call the police because of dissatisfaction with the buses - DID happen. I was not planning to have delegates go missing during the third committee session - DID happen. I was not planning to have a fire alarm go off at 1am in the morning after the delegate dance - DID happen. You get my drift?
However the nature of the Sec-Gen role is that while it is YOUR job to keep track of all these tiny details and create the bigger picture for the entire team to see at the same time, you can only micro-manage things the way YOU like them done for so long. It is impossible to pull off such a big operation without the support of your dream team. You have to trust the people you pick to work with you to do the necessary. And this means many a time, having processes run very differently from how you envisioned them: I set a goal to have topic papers all online before Halloween, didn't happen. I was set on having advisors do Security shift at night, didn't happen. I was not planning on having an advisor threaten to call the police because of dissatisfaction with the buses - DID happen. I was not planning to have delegates go missing during the third committee session - DID happen. I was not planning to have a fire alarm go off at 1am in the morning after the delegate dance - DID happen. You get my drift?
Alex Klein...SOCHUM. Can you see what is going on behind him? Yes, it is superlatives!
I learned slowly but surely that the most important thing is how you deal with these crises, and which ones you pick to personally get involved it vs. giving other members of the team the responsibility to do this. As a leader with authority and power, you have to set the tone for the rest of the team to create a vision of what you are all trying to accomplish. But if ideas start going off in different directions and you have a gas-leak at the Omni hotel where you are planning to hold closing ceremonies and advisors/delegates are freaking out vs. the fact that superlatives is being played in committee when you'd impressed upon the team the importance of having a "constructive" Sunday session with as much debate on substantive matters as possible, the latter really isn't that big of a deal.
5) Have fun. If you can't have fun 90% of the time, don't do it.
So this sounds really trivial and maybe a tad lame and cliche, but I mean it with all my heart. Being Sec-Gen was incredible and I had so much responsibility. But it meant that at times, I'd be doing YMUN stuff for 16 hours at a go, 40hrs a week during mid-terms. I was thinking, eating, breathing, sleeping YMUN. If I didn't love it at 5am after pulling an all-nighter with a paper due at 9am that morning that I hadn't started (as happened at least twice last year), there is no way I could have gotten through 12 months of YMUN. Now that the 35th session is over, there is definitely a void in my life because not only do I now have all this time to sleep (what do I do with myself?), but I miss having a constant source of enjoyment in an activity that I know would always make me happy at the end of the day.
Its been an phenomenal ride over the past year. I now hold the title of former Sec-Gen, but YMUN has been a huge part of my life, and the lessons learned I'm keeping with me forever.
See you at YMUN XXXVI...I'm running Security, so beware :-)
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