Bringing out Competitiveness within the School
With 163 delegates, Oxford International School (OIS) hit off its first intra-school Model United Nations (MUN) for two days on September 23 and 24. The programme featured 6 UN committees with delegates from 6th to 11th grade of the school. This event, one of the biggest to take place at the school, was all organised by the student body.
Fayez Mehdad, Secretary General for the MUN, talks on the importance of having intra-school MUNs, "Almost all the delegates are first-timers of MUN. Through this, we are helping the school students do better in the competitive MUN culture and bring in best delegation awards to OIS. Our tagline is 'Making future leaders' and that's what we intend to do."
For this MUN, chairs for each committee were carefully selected students with vast experience in MUNs from universities such as North South University and Dhaka University. This aspect allowed the newly acquainted delegates to get a better feel for MUN and they had the opportunity to soak in knowledge from the chairs.
The management team consisted of 9 core facilitators as well as 22 student officers who handled everything from security to food distribution. Sariha Nazifa Nawal, Adviser and the "brains behind the scenes," beamed about how well trained the organisers were. She talked about the conception of the idea for the event, "Usually it's university students who host MUNs, but after BANMUN 2014 was hosted at our school, I thought, why not us?"
To realise this true joy of a two day event, we have to look into how it came to be. There is none who can better explain this than Nazmul Hassan, Deputy Secretary General, "Initially when we announced the event, we had about 40 people sign up. So the next day, we went into classrooms, all of them, and on the top our voices shouted that we'd have not one but two gala nights and also burgers from Takeout. The numbers jumped from 40 to 150 in a night, which was far and beyond expectations. It was scary and exciting. Soon the response was so much, we had to strictly close off registrations."
Through the exhilarating process of everything going on, each of the committees were able to come up with resolutions by the second day. For beginning delegates, the resolution papers were executed very well and included all the MUN jargon and formalities.
The videos, created by Moztaba Zahid, Under Secretary General for Documentation (Photography & Videography), showcased on the closing ceremony, were representative of the liveliness and the effort towards learning that was present throughout the event. The ambiance was uplifting. Kashafat Tanjil Safina, in charge of socials, talked about how much work went into everything but that she'd "do it again and again."
Following the videos was a moving speech by Mahfuz Anam, Editor of The Daily Star, the Chief Guest of the event. Then, president of OIS, Shakhawat Hossain, discussed of the evolution of education. He spoke highly of the system of project based learning through MUN.
The closing ceremony came to an end with awards given off to the best performing delegates in each committee by their respective chairs and finally with teachers, who observed the event unfold closely, sing praises of the students for their achievement.
With a keen eye and a broken brain to mouth filter, Mahejabeen Hossain Nidhi has a habit of throwing obscure insults from classic novels at random people who may or may not have done anything to warrant them. Drop her a line at [email protected]
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