I have also been witnessing this atrocity by the Conference Directors of SelangorMUN, first-hand. Please allow me to elaborate. With PenangMUN, I was appointed as Co-Director of the SOCHUM. As we all understand, Directors are the ones who mainly drive the debate and chair procedural matters while the Co-Director assists them in their job. However, sadly, I have to say that my Director was thoroughly inexperienced, in ways such as: i. Preliminary briefings. Most of our committee were new delegates, with only a handful who have had previous MUN experience. Most of them did not know how MUN debates were carried out and needed a lot of guidance. I was dismissed by my Director when suggesting ways in which we could improve the preliminary workshops and was even warned by the Directors of PenangMUN to refrain from correcting my Director, not even in the most subtle form possible. ii. Procedural matters. As stated in the provisional selection criteria which is going to be posted very soon by the SelangorMUN secretariat, professionalism and experience are two key aspects of which chairs are based on. Based on this itself, my Director was not experienced at all and this led to many setbacks throughout the conference. iii. Professionalism of the Conference Directors I was personally told off by Sheau Yun not to even subtly notify my Director of her mistakes or how she could also add in pointers in between to assist the delegates in the accelerated understanding of the THIMUN procedure and MUN procedure in general. Also, I was told off for facilitating discussion within the delegates during lobbying and unmoderated caucus time, especially the delegates originating from a Chinese-medium secondary school in Penang. It is a minor issue, but I was personally called out by Hui Min and Jarrod, with Jarrod also personally confronting me, shouting to me after continuously asserting dominance and disregarding input into the matter by either me or my Director. Our goal, to educate and to stimulate the interest of delegates to participate in future MUN conferences, was severely hampered by these issues and sadly, there was little to no effort by the committee to rectify these, instead it got worse. I have to commend Hui Min for her efforts in maintaining diplomacy and have to state that she did encourage me to apply for a position at SelangorMUN. I proceeded to submit my application once again for Director at SelangorMUN, hoping to be able to renew my perspective and faith in the professionalism of the Selection Committee; however, I have found out that most, if not all the chairs, were hand-picked by the Conference Directors. Most, if not all the chair applications by the Google form provided, were disregarded due to this fact. With that said, right now, seeing as the director and co-director allocations have shown blatant disregard for the tenets of the SelangorMUN secretariat, I feel that I have to state all this to the Malaysian (and possibly international) Malaysian MUN-ers committee to shed some light on the issue we are facing at hand. Should Hui Min, Jarrod, Sheau Yun or any member of the Organising Committee of both conferences feel that I have misquoted anything in this post, please approach me personally through e-mail ([email protected]) and should there be found any discrepancy with my post, I will remove the offending segments with haste. However, I stand firm by my statements and believe there to be no discrepancy and I have made significant effort to be impartial when stating the Conference Directors missteps, which sadly have carried forward into SelangorMUN. Duly signed and sincerely, Calvin Chew.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 14:11:03 +0000