As mentioned in my goals post, one of my CAS creativity activities was COMUN. This blog post is a mid school year report about my COMUN 2020 experience. For those of you who do not know, COMUN is a Model United Nations simulation run predominantly by the schools in Colombo, with OSC being the head school. COMUN simulates various UN committees such as GA3, Security Council and World Health Organisation. This year (as well as the last one) I was selected to be part of the EXCO Tech team and I was appointed Deputy Head of Tech. As my title suggests, I assisted with the technology side of the program.
This year was especially different due to the presence of COVID. Meetings were held each Tuesday afternoon after school in one of the classrooms in OSC. However, COVID caused all the meetings to be online and there was a substantial drop in energy and productivity. Also, as a member of the tech team, I was assigned the duty of making all the zoom meetings. There were some issues that were encountered when making the meetings due to the restrictions of zoom. For example, I alone tried to make multiple meetings, but due to these restrictions, one user can host only one meeting at a time. This was fixed later by splitting the meetings across the team. Furthermore, I helped with the website and its editing and maintenance. Meticulous checking has to be done through multiple pages of code to fix certain issues and make sure everything is working properly. I also had a part to play in the faculty advisor meeting where I was in charge of the presentation and the slide changing (picture) (The faculty advisor meeting primarily serves to let the advisors know what is going on in COMUN this year and what are the topics that are to be discussed in the conference). It was quite a daunting task at first, but when I actually started it seemed easy. Every member of the EXCO is tasked with bringing in a sponsor each year for the funding of the event. For my sponsor, I contacted Unilever since my dad works with that company and I have good ties with them. However, they haven’t written back to me yet.
Until now, I believe that I have met Learning Outcome 4, which shows commitment and perseverance in my CAS experiences. By sticking with COMUN in this hard year with COVID as well as partaking in the IB program, I think that I have shown commitment to COMUN by being a helpful and useful member of the tech team. Furthermore, by working together as a tech team with my fellow DP 1s, I have demonstrated the skills of working collaboratively by splitting the workload equally and doing all our assigned tasks on time. COMUN, up till now, has been a fun and engaging experience and I hope that carries on to next year as well.