By Natalie Ang, Second Year Politics Student

I participated in the Croatian International Modeling United Nations (CIMUN) event in the heart of Zagreb, where we stayed for a week. It was a great opportunity to be there and I met lots of new people from Bosnia, Russia, Hungary, South Korea, and of course, Croatia! We had the opening event and were given the opening speeches by the Australian Ambassador of Zagreb, Mrs. Susan Cox, High representative of Government of Armenia, Mrs. Arlette Avakian, and Mr. Leo Novosel, the director and organisator of CIMUN, who is also a first year politics student in our university.

The next day, we were taught how to do a research about countries in the CIA World Factbook website, UN Cyber School Bus, UN Bisnet and The NGO website and a few more to find sources for the information we can use for the conference. Those websites will also be useful during my remaining years in the university as they are trusted sources and I can use that to find information for my assignments and projects. We get a better understanding about the United Nations and the ranks between the councils (The 6 organs of the UN) and also cases about the Russian – Ukraine conflict, where the conference is mainly about.

We discussed and debated  solutions and sanctions of our topic and also, we were taught how to do the working paper as we had to come up with a final document as a group when the conference ended. I learned more about the conflict in Ukraine and Russia and also about the crisis in Ukraine and NATO involvement. I have followed the news in the past few months and did a presentation on the topic relating to the situation in Ukraine, but I have not heard of it in-depth like we discussed it in the conference.

On the last day of the conference, we came up with a draft of the working paper and we also summed up with what we had discussed and debated about in the past 2 days.  I really enjoyed my time in Zagreb.  It gave me a great insight into how the UN works and I am excited to participate in more MUN events in the future.