Western Washington University’s International Affairs Association sent a group of students to New York City, New York for the National Model United Nations conference.
Student delegates from around the world attend this conference. This year, Western’s team of delegates won big, receiving an Outstanding Delegation award, which is only given to about 13% of groups that attend the conference each year, according to Riley Kessler, a Western Model U.N. delegate.
This is the second year in a row that the team has won this award, putting them in a group of about 3% of delegations that have won it two years in a row.
Model U.N. is a program where high school and college students are trained to attend conferences, usually within the U.S., with one international conference every year. At these conferences, the teams go to represent a country assigned to them, by working as if they were that country and applying their ideals.
Maggie Watts, a Western Model U.N. delegate, said that her experience with the program has sharpened her leadership and public speaking skills, which she previously struggled with.
Now more than ever, employers are using skill-based hiring, with 71% of businesses that participated in the Nace Job Outlook 2026 survey reporting that they use it in about half of their hiring.
The skills students who participate in Model U.N. learn can help them in the future when seeking jobs or internships post-graduation.
This year, the Western delegates were assigned to represent Nepal, so they looked at Nepali laws to familiarize themselves with the country in order to represent them accurately.
“To put it in a very simple way, there are all sorts of things about Nepal that we learned,” Kessler said. “It was really interesting. They're a non-aligned country, so they’re kind of stuck between China and India and can’t make alliances with one or the other.”
While in New York, they met Kaushal Kishor Ray, the deputy permanent representative of Nepal, one of the top-ranking diplomats for the country, who does the same thing the team was tasked to do for the actual U.N., making policies and changes while applying the ideals of Nepal.
This is a rare opportunity. Typically, a mission briefing, which is a meeting with a real representative from the country, is between 30 minutes and an hour. The Western team got an hour and a half, according to Connor Lincoln, Western’s Model U.N. president.
During the conference, the team showed strong teamwork and an ability to make deals with other delegates in the heat of the moment, which drew attention from the directors of the conference.
These skills led to them winning an Outstanding Delegation, which is the top award a team can win. At the New York conference, between 250 and 300 teams were represented, and only about 35 of those received the award.
Gabriel Townsend (he/him) is a first-year journalism student and campus news reporter for The Front this quarter. He spends a lot of his time walking around campus, spending time with friends, or if he gets the time, reading a fun novel. You can reach him at gabetownsend.thefront@gmail.com.
