Country Day Model United Nations students put on a show at fall conference

Students at La Jolla Country Day School are no strangers to spirited debate of global issues. But this year there’s a difference.

TorreyMUN, the school’s student-run Model United Nations initiative, brought together nearly 250 students from 12 schools across San Diego County and Tijuana last weekend for the first fall conference hosted solely by the Country Day group.

TorreyMUN is described as a mix of policy debate and theater, with delegates negotiating, drafting and passing resolutions at conferences across the world, from Yale University to the Netherlands.

The Sept. 27 conference was the seventh event overall that the group, which first formed in 2015, has hosted or co-hosted since 2020, many of them alongside The Preuss School in La Jolla under the name T&T MUN.

La Jolla Country Day students Steven Tao and Tanish Khanna, TorreyMUN’s co-secretary generals, ran and coordinated the event. Steven, a senior, said the group had a short turnaround time following its previous event in March.

“We started planning immediately in March for the September conference,” he said. “Me and my team spent pretty much all summer planning, coordinating, [doing] lots of … meetings just to prepare for a conference that pretty much kicked off as soon as school started.”

The event featured 10 committee sessions covering topics ranging from nuclear energy and freedom of the press to historical scenarios such as patriots and loyalists discussing the American Revolution and the U.N. Security Council convening to discuss the Gulf War.

Fiona Halloran, a TorreyMUN faculty adviser since 2019, said students “were eager to talk. Sometimes students can seem shy, but these delegates jumped right into collaboration and debated. They celebrated each other and sought to work together to find solutions in a way that showed how much they respected the potential of their peers.”

A school representative said LJCDS’ program boasts 110 students, representing nearly 25% of the upper school population.

“We had more delegates than ever before, suggesting that young people are eager to tackle the problems of our time,” Halloran said.

Junior Penelope Fleischer, co-chair of TorreyMUN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, said helping to run the event “was really incredible just to be sort of on the other side, because I’d done a lot of events before as a delegate. Organizing one or at least helping organize it … really gave me a [fresh] perspective.”

“I had this incredible moment in the afternoon where everyone was working on brainstorming … ideas to talk about food safety, like clean water pipelines in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” Penelope said. “And I just looked over at my co-chair, Katherine [Bevash], and I just thought this is really amazing that all these different people came together from different perspectives and are really committed to making a better future.”

The event coincided with the group’s 10th anniversary, and to pay homage, founding members Nikita Nair and Matthew Wirtz were honored at the closing ceremony with TorreyMUN Founder Awards.

Nair and Wirtz co-founded the group while they were in eighth grade and oversaw its growth from seven members in 2015 to more than 30 in 2020.

They also oversaw the first official TorreyMUN conference in 2020. After the COVID-19 pandemic struck that year, they quickly shifted from in-person events to virtual. Starting in 2022, conferences went from meeting virtually to alternating between LJCDS and The Preuss School on the UC San Diego campus.

Nair, now a medical student at the University of Louisville, said she flew in from Kentucky the night before the Sept. 27 event so she could arrive early and hear from her former teachers and listen to committee conversations.

“We reminisced about our experience launching the organization, joking about how we had to pull teeth and ask our friends to consider signing up to compete at a conference,” Nair recalled. “Hearing that the team now has over 110 members and had received 75 awards during last year’s season utterly shocked me.”

Wirtz said “It was very powerful to realize that something you had a hand in creating has impacted the lives of so many other students. I was very proud to see how much the MUN program at LJCDS has grown and to see how talented the delegates are.”

The experiences and skills Wirtz gleaned from TorreyMUN have already paid dividends in his career, he said. He is building out Andean Systems, a company that builds automated refineries turning electronic waste into minerals America needs for supply chains.

“Beyond the subject material, I often joke with friends that the most valuable skill MUN can teach is ‘woo’ — the ability to move others in pursuit of your cause,” Wirtz said. “It’s a subtle balance of persuasion, empathy and logical reasoning based in scientific analysis. And I have no doubt that building a company requires an ample amount of ‘woo.’”