By PHIL FIJALKOVICH

A week ago (October 18-21, 2001), the Case Western Reserve University Model United Nations Club (CWRUMUN) competed at the 8th annual Lake Erie Collegiate Model UN Conference on the campus of Kent-State Ashtabula. Like last year, the conference fell over fall break, so our team was a bit smaller than normal, but we nevertheless gave an outstanding team performance.

For the second time in the past three years, we came in first place with 42 points, tying our 1999 team for the highest team point total ever at the conference. However, whereas our 1999 team sent 22 delegates, we only sent 14 this year, so the performance was even more impressive. We were far ahead of the second place club, Ohio University, who had 37 points. 5 points may not seem like much, but, as Club alumnus and chair at the conference John Giorgis said, this was beyond dominance. He said "CWRU 42 Ohio 37 is like Nebraska - Troy State." For those of you who are not college football fans, Nebraska would utterly destroy Troy State, so our achievements were quite impressive this year.

Team Scores:

Moving on to our individual delegates' performances, we had an outstanding 10 of our 13 delegates who competed (1 of the original 14 had to leave for a family emergency) win an award. Even those who were not fortunate enough to win one performed very well and were certainly very close to doing so. To put this in perspective, 33 awards in all were given out. We won nearly one third of the awards, despite the fact that we were only one club out of the 9 or 10 schools attending. Additionally, as far as I know, we set the record for the number of superiors won with 4. Even our 1999 team, which had 8 excellents, had only 3 superiors. Perhaps even more importantly, 6 of our 13 delegates were new members, and yet they still performed like seasoned pros.

Besides our excellent accomplishments in committee, this was also one of the most fun conferences I have ever attended outside of Model UNing. The entire Club was together for most of the weekend, whether we were eating, roaming around the Ashtabula mall, watching a movie, or trying to stay alive while driving with Jim Moratti. I got to know the new members better, and I hope everyone figured out that Model UN is not all about competing.

Needless to say by now, our club members' performances at Lake Erie this year was truly amazing. Our club's future looks very bright because of them, and I would like to thank everyone for their participation.

Coming up next for CWRUMUN is our own conference, the Cleveland National Model UN Conference from November 9-11. In the next couple weeks we will spend most of our time preparing for this, but, after that weekend, we dive head first into preparing ourselves for the McGill Model UN Conference in January and the Harvard National Model UN Conference in February. Both are substantially more competitive than the Lake Erie Conference, but CWRUMUN has always performed well at them, and there is no reason to suspect that we will not this time around, especially given our performance last week.

Below you will find all of the club members who attended, their committee assignment, and their award, if they got one.

Committee Assignments & Awards