Concord Academy boasts many venerated and storied traditions, but few are as open to the public as the Concord Academy Model United Nations Conference (CAMUN). Unlike most Model UN conferences, which are typically hosted by a team of undergraduate students, CAMUN boasts the unique distinction of being entirely run by high schoolers—logistics to paperwork to the actual hosting of the conference itself is all managed by CA students.
This year's CAMUN was headed by Secretary General Irene Zheng ’24, who began preparation shortly after CAMUN 2023. In addition to helping set up each committee, Irene also handled numerous logistical duties, from campus mapping to communication with visiting schools. Despite the heavy workload, she still felt the experience to be immensely fulfilling. "The effort and time that one puts into the conference is greatly rewarded when we see how much genuine fun our delegates are having," said Irene.
Grace Goodman ’27, who served as a procedural rapporteur on the Human Rights Committee, highlighted the collaborative aspect of hosting a high school conference. "It was really great, being able to work together with everyone to make [CAMUN] happen," she said. "We all worked really hard and it was just a really rewarding experience all around. Grace was particularly grateful to her chair, Mei Reed ’25. "She was very fun to work with, and she did a really great job chairing [helping run] the committee as a whole, but also being very warm and inviting to her staff," said Grace.
August Sengupta ’24, who chaired the Paris Commune Crisis Committee, was similarly grateful to CAMUN's staffing team. "Everybody pitched in and a lot of people stayed really late on campus to help out, which was great," he said. "So it was a really fun experience 'cause everyone was helping." August also emphasized the key role that delegates played. "I was a little worried that the topic I did was just so obscure that people just wouldn't care about it," he said. "But no, they really cared about it [and] were super engaged in the committee."
As the chair of the Iranian Hostage Crisis Committee, I found CAMUN XX to be such a resounding success because of this combination of delegate engagement and genuine passion on the part of the staff, who were personally interested in improving the delegate experience at every turn. This enthusiasm was evident both throughout the day and in the months leading up to the conference. I found this atmosphere to be particularly prevalent in the backroom, where, away from prying eyes, staff worked against the clock to keep crisis updates flowing smoothly in. My own crisis members Jacob Himelfarb ’26 and Zhenya Smirnov ’26 were not only superb in their timing and delivery of crisis updates but also strove to improve the delegate experience. One of my favorite moments of the day came when Zhenya fashioned a classroom lectern into a model of an Iraqi tank and 'drove' it into the classroom, upon which Jacob delivered a crisis update that Iraq had, in committee, invaded Iran.
And CAMUN XX's delegates were no less eager in their involvement. Rather than backing into commonly-held tropes regarding Iranian fundamentalism or embracing U.S. interventionism, the members of my committee were outright curious to explore the alternate roads that this crisis could have taken. They actively worked to balance the conflicting needs of various blocks and strove to understand divergent perspectives—even as crisis updates threw massive and sudden roadblocks into negotiations. But what impressed me most was just how well-versed my committee was in the historical context of the Hostage Crisis. Beyond just a thorough understanding of the event and its political histories, the delegates I chaired had synthesized their knowledge into unique, nuanced views of post-revolutionary states, diplomatic concessions, and the rippling effects of foreign intervention. From the fortitude of their speeches to the intense-but-not-unkind unmoderated discussions, this nuance was reflected at every turn.
It was experiences like these that elevated CAMUN XX, and what keeps me looking forward to hosting it again next year. In putting on this conference year after year, CAMUN brings a group of individuals who grow that much closer to each other through a joint effort to embrace the outside world—and that kind of dual internal-external interaction can be very rare in the context of CA. As the conference moves into its third decade, I cannot help but be filled with wonder and anticipation about all of the possibilities, and all of the moments that may come next.