Walkie Talkies are now on charge. 13 days to go!

Where did September go?

As it's now October, things have been put into fast forwards mode...

I need to:
make envelopes
charge walkie talkies
sort catering
give them the envelopes
have a chair meeting


Then I'm DONE  and it will be conference day! I'm excited, nervous and every emotion.

Badges, badges everywhere:

So the conference is looming nearer, and this means I really had to step up the pace. My wild Friday night consisted of making over 100 badges... printing, cutting, sticking etc, but finally they have been completed!

 (Organised chaos)

Also, my resolution on Capital Punishment has been sent off for checking, so that's almost done too! I feel like everything's fitting together now and I'm really excited for it.

Exactly 17 days to go!!

Well, at least the pink walkie talkies have arrived.

The Ultimate ULTIMATE lack of communication:

As the organiser of this conference, I know exactly what is going on what, where, when and how. However, it is extremely clear that there are members of staff undermining my authority and telling me what to do, completely contradicting their fellow staff members and confusing the heck out of my tiny little damn brain.

I've decided just to go my own way with it now, I know what I am doing, and as I keep getting different answers from different teachers, I'll stick with what I organised first.

This sheer lack of trying from them, and communicating, really is not useful and will be heavily condemned in my evaluation of the project, as it is not my organisational skill that is delaying the project, but that of the school.

Envelopes and badge holders:

The badge holders and envelopes that I had ordered arrived today in the school office! Finally, something coming together... The topic sheets have almost been done too.

With only 24 days to go, I still have a lot of work left to do...the school are not being particularly cooperative at the moment with booking rooms and facilities and that's very annoying.

No-one else is being very cooperative with trying to help me in badge making or placard folding...with 110 envelopes to make, 110 placards to print and fold, 110 badges to cut and make, I've got a lot of work to do, not a lot of time to do it, and no-one to help me.

Effort.

25 days and counting!

The Ultimate Lack of Communication:

Room booking in my school is always an issue with over 800 pupils taking over the rooms at all times. Also, apparently some rooms are just "out-of-bounds" for no apparent reason.

Having been told I needed to see facilities to book the rooms, I went to them, they allowed me to book the assembly hall, but not any small rooms! That had to go to the SIMS Office....

I emailed SIMS multiple times with no replies to any of them. I then was ill from Thursday to Wednesday of the following week, so went on the Thursday to see them.

They then said, no, they did not have the authority to give me that info and I'd have to see the director of studies, which I did, who said he'd look into it...with SIMS.

I will definitely be writing about this lack of communication in my evaluation as this immense delay in me meeting deadlines has most definitely been this error. No-one seems to know who has the authority to do what.

Back to school

As I've gone back to school, EPQ is now going to have to be filled in my free time, which isn't great, but it's do-able.

The most important thing now is sticking to deadlines which I think I'm doing quite well so far.

Flags and big placards have already been sorted,
notepaper has been made,
chairing guide is complete and next year's secretariat have been chosen.

Six weeks to go and still a lot left to do.

Some (very for now) good news:

On a bank holiday Monday, my supervisor has spent the time to reply to my email...Lord knows what he's doing on a "rest-day" emailing me, but never mind.

He replied saying yes to my suggested topics (as long as my advisor says yes too), which is a great thing! It means I can start doing a lot of intensive (pah) research about the topics. Once I get the definite go-ahead I will put the topics up here and tell you a bit more about them.

I can tell you now that my two topics are broadly on human rights and education.

Hold-ups:

It's been a busy week in the form of AS remarks, doing school work last minute and seeing friends. I've been really eager to try and get as much EPQ done over the summer as possible because I really don't want to go back with a lot of work to do, plus all my A2 work!

The problem is that I need the go-ahead about topics from my supervisor and advisor before I can research and make any delegate packs. They're the last (but biggest) thing I now need to do and it's worrying me I won't get them done before we go back to school...oh well.

Ta-da!

The chairing guide only needs the finished resolutions to be inserted, which coincidentally I've not written, but other than that, let's all let out a sigh of relief that it's done.

Next step is finalising my topics so that I can write the resolution and topic guide-type things for it. Delegate packs need doing.

I think I'm on top of things. I need to fill in my EPQ log though as I'm quite far behind on that! (Woops). Looking forward to what's to come!

Time flies

I haven't been blogging as frequently as normal because I've had a lot of other things on, but mainly because the logistics of my EPQ have changed a bit. I'm now having delegates work in threes and having a specific focus on certain skills I want to impart to the delegates.

I've been producing a chairing guide for a few weeks to give to Chairs before the conference so it can run smoothly. Huzzah, fourteen pages later and it is almost fully complete!

Although I'm still at loggerheads, soon I'll post about topics I've chosen to do as I'm still in the brainstorming process. Need to get going though because deadline for all delegate packs is October 1st! (Believe me, it sounds far away, but it really isn't.) Topics need choosing, countries need researching and resolutions need writing!

Lastly, and very minor points indeed, I've realised that I'm going to have to make my own certificates for the conferences with my own logo on. Once I get back to school and can access photoshop for free (yay for being stingy), I'll make my own logo and certificates template.

'Till then I've got a lot more work to do and very little time to do it!

Workshoppin'

I've been spending a lot of time this week writing the policy statement workshop that the year eights will undertake.

It's a lot of hassle, as I'm not sure whether I'm even meant to be referencing here...

Lots and lots to do, this was just a quick post to say I'm keeping up with work AND I managed to get hold of my supervisor. 

I have also emailed some other MUN directors to ask them "what makes a good topic".

Update:

- Munom are yet to get back to me about my inquiry as to whether I can reference their student officer handbook in my chairing guide.

So, the most important things now are:

Try and get hold of my supervisor to run a few urgent questions past him,

Choose topics for the conference, 

Then write two topic guides, one on each

Choose countries to be research dependent on relevancy for topics and ease of research

Make chairing guide

Write before/after conference survey and pilot test 

Too much to do, so little time to do it...

(If my supervisor or anyone who can contact him without using school email reads this, please do, it's very important I ask him a few questions or my progress will be hindered). 

A little bit of funny for you:

Having conducted a bit of unofficial pilot research with some current year sevens (my target audience), here are some great (if not useless) replies to the question: "What do you understand by the phrase M-U-N?"

1.) "It's not M-U-N, it's THE U-N, Lucy I thought you were clever."

2.) "Is it meant to be an insult?"

And lastly, and a personal favourite:

3.) "I don't know, but I think my mum said it's good for your personal ucas"

So, looks like I'll need to tweak a few questions for my survey if I'm hoping to get useful responses to how much the delegates know about Model United Nations before the conference.

Google to the rescue

Having googled "MUNOM", it is now evident that the chair guide I have acquired is from a model united nations in Munich, Germany.

I have contacted the administrators there for referenced use of their handbook as part of my EPQ and will make sure that I keep the blog updated with how it goes.

Brainwave!

Whilst reading through an extremely good chairing guide for MUN, I've decided to create my own chairing guide using this as a basis.

Only problem is, I may (or may not) have "borrowed" this guide from a previous conference and I don't know which one! It was in my MUN stockpile of papers... all I have is "MUNOM" on the front so I shall be searching the internet and messaging all the MUN directors to find out where it is from so I can reference it properly!

More to come soon.

At last, some progress!

So as you know, I've been on holiday and have been very slow progress-wise. However, now I'm back home and got all my documents ready, I'm back on my feet!

Planning has begun and I have a very good structure to the day, with scheduled breaks and knowledge of how the day will now plan out.
The overall structure of the day (without detail) is as follows:
Opening Ceremony
Policy Statement Workshop and Delivery
Break
Resolution Distribution and Lobbying
Research
Debate
Closing Ceremony

I'll need to discuss numbers of delegates with my supervisor before going much further and I still need to decide topics and write the topic guides.

HOWEVER! I have decided upon two committees: political, and economic and social, because I have experience of being in both and think that these are the most exciting and easy to grasp committees for beginners.

The planning will continue throughout the summer, but I'm definitely back on track now!

Holiday

A week off for a holiday means work has piled and not only that, but I'm falling behind with the deadlines I've set myself! This means that blog posts will be a bit slower and a bit shorter as I catch up with the work I've missed.

However, I have started an EPQ planning-book to jot down any notes I can think of whilst I'm out and about and suddenly have a brain-wave!

Work for this week will focus on the creation of a survey to asses how much delegates know about Model United Nations and possibly the UN itself before they attend my conference.

Wish me luck.

And thus, the research begins:

By the end of this week, I hope to have sorted:

- How the day will work on the whole

- Timings

- Find an overall aim for the day that can easily be evaluated once complete.

Also, if you weren't aware, the blog is now translatable into various languages by using the google translate bar.

The translate bar^^

Date approved!

Also, a date for my conference/EPQ has been approved finally! It will be on the 16th October 2013, so watch this space...

Trial Run One:

So if you've been following my blog (which I know a few of you have), you'll know that recently I ran a mini-MUN conference for year 10 students from around the area. - Obviously I had a lot of help running this conference and it would be rude of me to not acknowledge the amazing work that they did, so thank you all -

- not so sure about the photographer though.... -

 So, how does this fit in with my EPQ? 

Well, by running the day I've learnt a lot about how to fine tune the planning for my EPQ:
- Get enough people to help you set up all the tables!
 - Chairs need to keep on top of all the debates and make sure that all delegates speak;
 - A clear plan is needed when debate becomes slow or boring;
- Instructions to delegates need to be as clear as possible.

 But, what I found most useful from the day wasn't actually running the conference from behind the scenes, it was more about trying to speak to most of the delegates to make sure they were confident with how they were running.

 Having spoken to a lot of the delegates at the start of the conference, it was clear to me that many of them were low in confidence as they were unsure of what to do/say during the conference.

The idea of knowing what to say and knowing enough about your country is something that I'm going to have to work into the planning of my conference quite early on.

Overall though, a really fun day and definitely a very worthwhile experience.

(The clear-up's never great though....)

A busy time!

Blog posts have become a lot slower now we're edging closer to the practise run of my MUN conference for my EPQ.
This conference, which is now tomorrow, is not solely for my EPQ of course, but is a great way for me to do some practical research and find out how things like these work from behind the scenes. I will be chairing General Assembly, as well as having made floor plans, delegate packs and all that sort of admin.
(A photo showing the relief that the Secretariat have sorted everything - folded all placards and done the badges!)
 I definitely could not have done it without my wonderful team of Secretariat and without them I would have been in a right state. So a public thank you to all of them. I hope the conference tomorrow runs smoothly and of course, will update the blog with the trials, trepidations and successes of my time!

The research begins:

So, now that I have a new laptop, I can begin blogging properly! Photos, videos and more posts, (with spell check this time!), will be a new feature to lucy-blogs-her-epq! If you read the post, feel free to tweet about it with the hashtag #lucyblogsherepq.

Right, now the serious business, I'm beginning reading two books to get an overview of the purpose of the United Nations. This is just to asses the true purpose of their existence and to give my conference more focus on the day. At the moment I'm hoping to focus on maintaining international peace and security and these two books (above and below), will allow me to concentrate on that.

Feel free to comment on the blog and let me know what you'd like to see/have liked seeing!

Internationality

(Photo taken after two days of the blog's beginnings). Having only been live for about a week, this blog has been viewed in three different continents already, (North America, Europe and Asia), and this gave me an excellent point for my EPQ. This is titled "the ease of internationality", by which I mean that now it is easier than ever to contact people across the Globe. This means that ideas can be shared far more easily, and advances in technology allow for communication. Across seas that would have been much harder when the UN were formed in 1945. Today, the need for international communication is more vital than ever, and we should be thankful that it is so easy to do this as it speeds up crisis caucuses ten-fold.

Planning for next week's conference

A busy week is ahead in terms of practical EPQ research in the form of planning and running a conference for younger students. This means that I will have to delegate out jobs to people, at times mundane ones at that, all to ensure that the conference runs smoothly. The first task was flag sorting, now that took a while, even I don't profess to have knowledge of the world's flags! Once I get a new laptop I'll update this post with beautiful pictures of the 149 (!!) different flags we have to pick and choose from and the finished, sorted articles! A mundane job, but a very necessary one at that! Placards are next point of call!

Photos of my research, planning and conferences will be up soon.

However, due to the nature of this project, I will not be uploading any photos, videos or photographic content that feature my school, its pupils and or its teachers. This is for both safety and personal privacy, but I will be sharing photos of my research, like books and magazines, surveys and general plans.

Stage One: Research

So Stage One of the whole process is finding out how to make it popular with people who don't currently do Model UN. The first thing I did was hit twitter and other forms of social media, and asked my followers the question: Why don't you do MUN? To which the replies were: - can't be bothered - too much work - I don't know enough about it So, my aim first and foremost with my EPQ is to explain what a conference is and why it's so important. #MUN #lucyblogsherepq

Why a blog?

I am a sixth former with an interest in International Relations and the way different countries' governments interact. So, for my EPQ (Extended Project Qualification, which will give me a grade equivalent to an AS level), I'm running and organising a Model United Nations conference at my school, to teach year eight about the UN, how MUN conferences work, and world politics. This blog will keep both me, and the reader, up to date with all and any progress I make in the research towards producing a successful MUN conference in October.