Representing Canada, Saint Vincent, and Japan at National Model UN
November 10, 2025 | Leadership
Over the course of a single year I represented three countries I have never lived in, argued positions I did not personally hold, and wore a suit in forty degree weather because it was the warmest thing I had packed. That is the short version of Model UN. The longer version is that I spent three National Model United Nations conferences learning how to disagree with people without turning them into enemies, and somewhere along the way I realized the real skill has very little to do with international policy. It is about getting a room full of strangers with competing interests to land on something they can all live with. I did all three through Florida Atlantic University and the Leon Charney Diplomacy Program at the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College, and they are the reason any of it happened.
Canada, and Learning to Argue Someone Else's Case
My first conference was in Washington in November of 2024, representing Canada in the second General Assembly. Our committee was assigned the preservation of natural resources for economic development, which sounds dry right up until you are three hours into a negotiation over how to word a single clause about resource sovereignty and you genuinely care how it ends. Representing Canada meant arguing the way Canada would argue, not the way I would, and that distinction took me an embarrassingly long time to internalize. You are not there to win. You are there to make your assigned country sound reasonable to two hundred other people.
The actual work was drafting proposals and then building enough of a coalition that your language survived to the final document. I spent that week negotiating with countries like Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Equatorial Guinea, which is not a list of conversation partners I ever expected to have. You learn fast that everyone in the room wants something slightly different, and the entire exercise is finding the sliver of overlap where all of those wants can coexist. By the last day I cared more about whether our bloc held together than whether my own original idea had made the cut, which, in hindsight, was the entire point.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and the Math of Agreement
The second conference was in New York in April of 2025, representing Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Going from Canada to a small island nation completely changed how I had to operate. When you are a smaller delegation you cannot win on sheer weight, so you win on credibility and on being the person other countries actually want at their table. I was placed in the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, working on keeping chemical weapons out of the hands of non-state actors. The subject was heavier than my first committee, and the negotiation ran across hundreds of member states, which makes the arithmetic of building agreement genuinely hard.
Getting hundreds of countries to agree on anything is less about being right and more about being patient. You concede a little here, you hold firm there, and slowly the draft starts to resemble something everyone can put their name to. The photo below is the part of Model UN that never makes the highlight reel: standing in the aisle between sessions, talking a clause through with two other delegates, trying to find the version of a sentence that none of us love but all of us can accept.
New York was an experience all on its own. It hovered around forty degrees the entire trip, so I essentially lived in my one warm blazer, on the reasonable theory that I had not come all this way to freeze for the sake of variety. Between sessions our group made the most of the city, and we capped the week with a visit to United Nations Headquarters on the East River. Walking the real General Assembly Hall after a week of pretending to be a delegate in a mock version of it is a strange and humbling thing. You spend days treating the institution as a game, and then you are standing under the actual gold emblem and remembering that the game is modeled on something that genuinely runs the world.
There was also a delegate dance, which is exactly what it sounds like: a room full of people who had negotiated chemical weapons policy all day, in the same business attire, trying to remember how to relax for one evening. It is one of those things that should be awkward and somehow is not.
An Hour on Wall Street
The strangest and best part of the New York trip had nothing to do with diplomacy. Through FAU, our group got a tour of the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange, and I learned more odd history in one hour than I had in months. The exchange is one of the last major markets in the world that still keeps a physical trading floor, which gives the whole place the air of a museum that happens to move billions of dollars a day. We had visitor badges, a guide, and a startling amount of access for a group of college students.
The origin story is my favorite part. The whole thing began under a tree, where twenty-four traders signed an agreement that eventually grew into the exchange. Before computers, all the math was done by hand in the basement, and our guide mentioned it was mostly women doing that work, which I had somehow never heard before. The floor itself used to be ankle-deep in paper slips, the physical paper trail of every single trade. I walked in expecting to be politely bored and walked out genuinely fascinated, which is about the best outcome a tour can hope for.
A City Worth the Detour
Between committee sessions, New York did what New York does. We saw the Metropolitan Museum, wandered Central Park while the trees were just starting to turn over into spring, passed through Grand Central with its impossible green ceiling, and ate the kind of late-night pizza that a forty degree week makes feel medically necessary. It is a strange rhythm, arguing chemical weapons policy by day and being a tourist by night, but it is also the version of the trip I think about most.
Japan, an Award, and My Dad in the Room
My final conference brought me back to Washington in November of 2025, representing Japan in the third General Assembly. Our focus was strategic education enhancement, which was a fitting place to finish, since the whole year had been one long education in how people actually reach agreement. By this point I knew the rhythm of a conference well enough to stop fighting it and simply work it, and that ease showed up in the writing. I am proud to say I came home with a position paper award for the work I put in representing Japan.
The moment I will actually remember, though, had nothing to do with the award. My dad happened to be in Virginia for a work conference of his own, and without telling me a thing, he walked into the General Assembly and surprised me mid-session. I was in the middle of being a very serious diplomat for a country on the other side of the world, and then my dad was simply there, cowboy hat and all. Three conferences of practicing composure, and that is the one moment that nearly undid all of it.
What Three Countries Taught Me
The easy takeaway is that I got better at public speaking and at writing policy, which is true but undersells what actually changed. Representing Canada, then a small island nation, then Japan forced me to build a case from inside three completely different sets of priorities, and you cannot do that without loosening the grip on your own. I am far more willing now to assume the person across the table has a real reason for wanting what they want, even when I think they are wrong, and that single shift makes almost every disagreement easier to get through.
The other half of it is the people. The friendships I made standing around in business attire near midnight, rewording one clause for the fortieth time, are the part I would not trade for any award. I am grateful to the Leon Charney Diplomacy Program and to FAU for three chances to step into someone else's shoes for a few days at a time, because I came back from each one a little closer to the person I actually want to be.
Written by Ryleigh Newman