Continued
Popular around the world, Model UN (also know as MUN) is an educational activity in which students play the roles of delegates to the United Nations and simulate serving on UN committees. Participating in competitions organized by universities—high school and even middle school students have their own versions—they debate real-world issues and are judged on a battery of skills in areas such as strategy and tactics, analytical thinking and teamwork. FIU has fielded a team for more than 30 years and currently counts about 75 members—
An estimated 400,000+ middle school ’ high school and college/university students worldwide participate in Model UN every year.
culled through a process of formal application, interviews and tryouts—who take turns competing throughout the year. In Anacki’s case, he went from battling at the high school level straight to FIU, where his multiple top-place performances helped push the Panthers past other powerhouses—all of them elite private universities, many in the Northeast—to earn FIU the historic ranking. “It was a very big deal for us,” Anacki says. “It’s a real testament to the work we’ve put in throughout the year.” A HISTORY OF EXCELLENCE For more than 10 years, FIU has been the top public university team in the United States. And for the past half dozen years, it held steady as a top-5 program among all universities, jockeying for position with rivals Georgetown, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and the University of Chicago, before rising to the summit in 2019. “No other college MUN team came close,’’ in terms of the number of individual and group awards it earned over the academic year, wrote the editors at Best Delegate, the organization that rates teams based on the totality of performances at competition. (In another first, the team won Best Large Delegation at Harvard University National Model UN, considered the toughest competition on the circuit.) They cited the whopping number of conferences—14—in which FIU competed and recognized the “training and hard work” that students brought to the task. That heavy lifting includes extensive research on the policies and history of the particular country one is to represent and in-depth examination of the topics slated for possible discussion. The latter run the gamut from issues such as promoting sustainable rural entrepreneurship and protecting women in migration from human trafficking to nuclear disarmament and the curbing of illicit trade in small arms and light weapons. Equally critical to the team’s triumph: the many resources that FIU invests, which include an academic course, a full-time director, travel support from the Student Government Association and direct involvement from the dean of the Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs, John F. Stack Jr.
22 | FALL 2019
