Georgetown University will host its 52nd annual North American Invitational Model United Nations conference at the Washington Hilton Feb. 12-15. The conference continues to draw thousands of students from all over the world to discuss global affairs and this year will feature new initiatives to better engage participants and serve the mission of NAIMUN.

Founded in 1963, NAIMUN is the largest exclusively student-run Model United Nations conference in the world. This year, NAIMUN is expecting over 2,700 participating delegates hailing from 10 countries including the United States, and 200 Georgetown University student staffers will work as event planners and discussion moderators to ensure the smooth running of the conference.

The year’s conference will include a bigger emphasis on the educational aspect of Model United Nations.

“MUN is, at the end of the day, a competition, so it is very easy watching the participants get lost in the competitive aspect,” Undersecretary General of General Assemblies Allison Kim (SFS ’16) said. “But this can be detrimental to the overall purpose and the principle behind MUN, which is to raise awareness about big international issues and teach the skills related to solving these problems.”

The planning committee hopes to encourage greater interests for international affairs from the participants by helping them better apply the knowledge they learn in NAIMUN to the real world, Kim said.

“We try to incorporate a new element to this year’s conference, which is that, at the end of the committee session, we will be going through the lessons learned with the participants,” Kim said. “For example, we will be asking questions like, what have you learned throughout the week? How have your decisions affected your outcomes in the situation you were put in? In this way, we hope to bring the esoteric topics down to the level of reality and policy, and focus on how they impact the real world.”

The conference will include a variety of activities planned specifically to introduce participants to the vibrant college culture at Georgetown, although the groups will not be physically on campus. One such activity, Hilltop Madness, will bring together dance performance groups from the university to have a special showcase for the participants.

According to Secretary General Andrew Lyu (SFS ’16), the central and most important aspect in planning the event is the quality of experience the MUN participants will receive. Despite an increased number of participants expected this year, NAIMUN coordinators will continue to keep the size of each committee small and increase the number of committees to ensure that it can effectively engage every participant. There is also an attempt to increase the variety of topics discussed during the conference.

“The biggest difficulty in planning a conference of this scale is to make sure that there is a wide enough variety that delegates are able to find something they enjoy,” Lyu said. “This involves recognizing equal distribution of positions and topics so that all participants get something enjoyable.”

Lyu added that NAIMUN has always developed innovative topics to engage the participants.

“The uniqueness of running MUN at Georgetown is that we don’t get bogged down into the same topics over and over again,” Lyu said. “Even though you have traditional committees that have consistent themes like disarmament, social cultural themes, humanitarian aid and so on, people running these committee are choosing novel topics that are niche and different so that people do have interests to talk about them.”

Executive Director Aaron Lewis (MSB ’16) said that he wants participants to walk away from the conference having had a good time but also having learned what it takes to be involved in the arena of global policy.

“Essentially, we are trying to strike a balance between education and fun,” Lewis said. “We want the participants to have a fun weekend experiencing everything that D.C. has to offer and to learn about college and Georgetown, while also, through the NAIMUN experience, becoming better public speakers, debaters and global citizens.”