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.