During the first weekend of March 2025 I had the opportunity to attend a Model United Nations (Model UN) Conference at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Model UN is, in essence, an activity in which (in its original formulation) primarily high school students get together for the purpose of pretending to be delegates to the United Nations, a situation which is admittedly quite ridiculous on the surface but nevertheless is something in which hundreds of thousands of students take part just in the U.S. alone.

Another way of looking at it is that predominantly high schoolers dress up and pretend to be diplomats on the floor of the United Nations.

This was my third year attending, and, in addition to looking at it through a serious student representative’s perspective, I chose to document some of the chaos and confusion that defined the event.

When I first arrived at the conference, I saw something that must have been deeply confusing to nearly every Tarheel college student who saw us, high school students wearing suits and pretending to be serious people.

The opening speaker, the Indonesian ambassador to the United States, spoke for nearly an hour. His talk was overall uninteresting and had little to offer, besides another example of an ill-fitting suit and a speech about an Indonesian cultural festival nearly 300 miles away.

Near the end, he asked trivia questions about his country, and I answered one correctly. It granted me a surprisingly high-quality laptop case which is currently sitting somewhere in my bedroom.

Then it was time to break up into committees. Although most delegates do what is known as a general committee, I did a crisis committee.

A crisis committee has four central distinctions:

1. Rather than passing the traditional resolutions with many highly formal clauses recognizing the goals and issues related to the resolution, along with laying out every single policy in fine, pointed detail, the committee passes directives that rarely are more than a page and often contain much less specific pieces of proposed policy actions.

2. Rather than the traditional general committee where everything is laid out in public for the delegate to see, and occasionally alliances can break apart in dramatic detail, there is a “backroom” where delegates can send notes for advancing their own personal plots and agendas throughout the committee.

3. In a crisis, one does not necessarily represent a country; one can represent individuals, corporations or non-governmental organizations.

4. Rather than each committee having a stable and fixed plotline to which one must respond, anyone in crisis regularly receives regular and often dramatic updates with crises which the committee has to respond to and which often reveal products of the plots which each committee member has been secretly working.

I ended up in my committee room no more than half an hour after the opening ceremonies ended. It was an excessively hot and overly small room filled with a series of rotating desk chairs, which were, luckily enough, padded and had built-in tables.

Immediately after arriving at the committee, I read the somewhat dense document, which outlined everything there was to know about the lore of the scenario.

I also figured out to what character the number on my name tag corresponded and assumed the role. As soon as I deduced I was a FEMA official, I began attempting to devise a simple and obvious plan: steal money from the government.

My committee operated within this framework but was distinguished by the fact that it was an ad hoc committee, which meant that I did not know the situation until I sat in committee.

For mine, the problem was a zombie apocalypse based on the plot of the video game and TV show “The Last of Us.” For those who don’t know, the premise of the TV show is that a zombie apocalypse caused by the Cordyceps fungus has brought about the fall of global civilization.

As the committee dragged on and I watched the clock, I began using my crisis notes to hopefully get to Alaska so I could start a new life, but my wife Ella, a proxy character for the backroom team for my personal crisis arc, quickly shot down that plan.

Once I received the response to my first note indicating that this was not going to happen (since, in the simulation, both Alaska and Hawaii had been shut off from the outside world), I immediately began the slow process of figuring out what to do next.

My decision ended up boiling down to what political ideology I would use to justify building a violent militia to do my bidding, using all the money I clandestinely stole from the government and converted into gold.

For this task, I, of course, chose communism.

I chose it mainly on the basis that I thought it would be comical to see how the committee heads, who had even prohibited us from mentioning COVID-19, would approach the mention of such a political philosophy.

Then I went to work. Initially, I tried to seize the Boston, Massachusetts, City Hall (where we were located) but once we moved to Wichita, Kansas, I continued a modified set of operations in that region.

In the following crisis update, after we left Boston for Wichita, we had to clarify that my new polity of the “People’s Republic of Wichita” had nothing to do with socialism or communism of any sort. My take? It did.

In this story, I will now quickly remove the fictional situation in my committee and focus on the real-life situation surrounding the committee’s context.

Admittedly, the real-life situation was not as exciting as the storylines of cults, revolutions and a zombie apocalypse.

The Model UN chaos and craziness did not conclude when our committee did. When our session concluded, I thought the chaos would end, but then I got to the dining hall.

Walking around the campus was already chaotic enough, and the sight of a bunch of teenagers in suits swarming the campus buildings must have been quite entertaining from an outsider’s perspective given the degree of faux seriousness involved.

The dining halls took it to another level. I checked out one of their student dining halls with a few people I knew.

As I walked through the dining halls, I noticed the oddly consistent presence of trash on many tables, which seemed like they had just had children sitting at them, which they did, but more so was of how this entire event was a spectacle that showed off the faux-dignity of high school life in 2025.

The students in ill fitting suits crowded the dining hall no matter where I looked.

As for the food, it was not particularly good. The pizza was cold, the Indian food was mediocre, and the sweet tea tasted like sugar-coated plastic. I drank it anyway.

The dining hall was utterly chaotic, and if my memory serves me correctly, I am at least fifty percent sure I saw at least one fistfight.

Ultimately, the chaos involved in Model UN was obvious but also pretty amazing.

Outside of the regular chaos, both in committee and in the dining halls, Model UN is an activity that teaches one much about cooperation despite the chaos involved.

The conference was an assembly of students in ill-fitting suits pretending to be serious people, which created a spectacle of chaos and awkwardness.

But it was the sheer craziness of the entire conference, both in and out of committee, which made it so amazing.