Last weekend, hundreds of college students descended on the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Bethesda, Md., for a weekend of diplomacy, crisis situations and backroom deals. Each year, the Georgetown International Relations Association holds two major Model U.N. conferences: the National Collegiate Security Conference at the beginning of November and the North American Invitational Model United Nations in February. NCSC’s executive team, Secretary-General Alex Bozzette (SFS ’12) and Executive Director Leah Dreyfuss (SFS ’12), sat down with THE HOYA to take a look back at this year’s conference, charity programs and the differences between NCSC and NAIMUN.

When did planning for NCSC begin?

Leah: Actually, just about a year before NCSC took place. I believe we were first appointed on Oct. 27, 2009, and NCSC started on Oct. 28, 2010, so a full year of planning went into four days.

How did the move of the location affect the conference?

Alex: NCSC was held on campus at the Georgetown Conference Center in previous years, but the move to the Hyatt Regency was a very positive one. It provided a much better conference atmosphere and simultaneously allowed us to create a much more cohesive staff. NCSC was a bonding experience that was far better than anything we could have imagined.

L: The hotel we were at this year is actually going to be our home for the next two years. We basically took over the hotel, and the staff at the hotel was absolutely wonderful. They were a really useful and energetic staff. They actually enjoyed having 700 college students for four days, as much as one might think to the contrary.

Both of you have experience with NAIMUN. What would you say are the differences between NAIMUN and NCSC?

A: NAIMUN has high school students and NCSC has college students. That is an importance difference that is reflected in some committees that we run. At NCSC, by having college-age delegates, you gain something.

L: There’s a certain level of substantive understanding and detailed knowledge that you have with college students that you don’t have with high school students, which allows you to conduct simulations that I think high school students would be overwhelmed by. NAIMUN is in essence a Model U.N. conference, in that it simulates a lot of actual U.N. bodies. NCSC differs in that you tend to simulate very few U.N. bodies and focus more on what we believe are more powerful decision-making bodies in international politics.

A: By having participants and staffers that are the same age, something that NCSC gains is more of a dialogue and an educational experience. When committee session ends, you’re not as separate as you are in a traditional college staff, high school participant Model U.N.-type conference. It builds relationships across universities that go beyond the four days of the actual conference.

What would you say is the main difference between running the conference and competing in the conference?

A: One of the things that helped to make NCSC as strong as it was, was that each of our staffers brought something unique to each simulation they participated in. You had people’s personal backgrounds and academic interests coming together on the staffing side to create simulations that were each unique in their own special way that heightened the quality of each of the committees we ran and created a more positive experience for all of our delegates.

L: There’s a certain degree of staffing that affords you a certain sense of omnipotence that being a delegate doesn’t. I know that the chairs and crisis managers of NCSC and of NAIMUN very much enjoy the fact that they get to control the way things are going. But the delegates this year at NCSC really pushed our chairs and our crisis managers and made the events turn in ways that were not anticipated, which I would say is a sign of the quality of delegates we get at NCSC. They really push our staff, and seem to say, `Do you really know what you’re talking about? Are you as substantively strong in this area as you’ve purported to be with a 30-some-odd page background guide?’

What were some of the more unique committees at NCSC this year?

A: We try to think of committees that broadly relate to that security focus, which I really enjoyed, because we ran committees that addressed all different sides of security. You had humanitarian security, geopolitical security and martial security in the more traditional sense that you’d imagine, so we ran everything from a health crisis to a tsunami crisis to a historical crisis of war simulation between multiple bodies.

L: So the health crisis Alex was talking about simulated the U.S. National Security Council. Our former secretary-general, Mike McGrath (NHS ’11), actually led that committee, and he is a student in the NHS majoring in management and health care policy, so he wanted to do a hypothetical epidemic outbreak, and how the U.S. National Security Council would respond to such an event. As far as the tsunami one, we had ASEAN, which is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and a summit in response to the 2004 tsunami, which actually was a larger committee but ran really, really well, the delegates said, as far as the crisis went, which we were really pleased to hear, and the last one he referred to was the Soviet jihad triple crisis, which was a simulation of three different acting bodies – the Soviet Politburo, the Pakistani cabinet and the Afghani mujahideen in the 1980s simulating the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. As you can see, I think the topical breadth as well as the geographical breadth was immense, and we were really pleased to see that.

A: We got a little bit into this, but something else that varies across committees hugely is committee size. We ran everything from the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, which had a hundred participants, to a simulation of the Hamas leadership summit in Gaza City, which had 16 delegates, so you had a very different dynamic across NCSC’s different committees.

Did you face any challenges during NCSC?

A: Any time you have 700 college students gathering in a hotel, you’re going to have challenges, but overall things were managed well and people had fun without having too much fun.

L: As far as college students go, we saw some things we weren’t expecting, but nothing that we couldn’t handle. We all walked away relatively unscathed.

What kinds of activities did NCSC try to encourage outside of the committee sessions?

A: Outside of committee, we try to create a social atmosphere that can’t exist at NAIMUN, because of the age difference.

L: We have a bar club for our 21-and-olders. We also do trick-or-treating on Embassy Row. Finally, we also had the traditional club night, where we rented out an entire club for all the students to mingle.

A: A new tradition was NCSC charity drive. It was a fundraising competition between all the committees at NCSC. Each committee got to choose [its] own charity to donate to. In doing so, we were able to match the interests of the students with the charity they could donate to. In the end, we gave all the money raised to the committee that raised the most money.

L: We had to work during the summer to develop the perfect equation, so nobody would be punished because of the size of their committee. We ended up weighing per-capita donations the most, and the committee that ended up winning was the Hamas Leadership Committee, which donated the money to Seeds for Peace. We raised almost $4,000, and our sponsoring organization GIRA is donating one-fourth of the money we raised, bringing our total up to $5,000, more than five times what NCSC has ever raised.

– Interview by Stephen Levy