12 Emerson Differentiation

The event that made me want to do something for my community is when I did my first MUN in 9th grade. From this moment I was fascinated with how much fun it was and the learning experience it was for me. It taught me how to look at world wide issues and find a logical solution to them. It also taught me how to work with people who are stubborn and it also taught me to look at different perspectives, even if I didn’t agree with them. I enjoyed the experience and what I had learned so much that I wanted to bring this to our school as a part of our Creativity, Action, Service project in IB.

Originally I didn’t know what I wanted to do for my CAS project, I couldn’t find anything that would meaningfully give back to the community. Then I started thinking about how fun MUN is and the experience one gains from it. So having decided I wanted to do that, I teamed up with 2 other students to bring that MUN experience to our community.  We began planning, we chose the topics, committees, chairs, etc. And then the pandemic hit…

We were weeks out from the MUN we had planned and coordinated and school got shut down and we moved to online learning. During our entire time in online learning my team and I have gone back and forth over how to still bring this activity to the community but we have yet to narrow down on the exact way we should do it. We then got a better idea of what to do when we participated in an annual MUN at a school here in Costa Rica, which was hosted online. The days were long and hard, lots of headaches. Even though I won an award it was an experience that I didn’t want to bring to our school community because I felt it wasn’t the best image of what an MUN is. At the end of the day this entire process has shown me that not everything will go according to plan and that plans need to be adaptable in order to be excellent plans, this is a learning experience that I hope to employ in the future as it will only help my personal organization and will make me a better leader.