The Riverside Community College District Model United Nations (MUN) team, a joint delegation with seventeen students from five universities in Japan, won the Outstanding Delegation award at the 2021 International Model United Nations Conference held virtually March 28-31.
The team consisted of twenty-five students from Moreno Valley, Norco, Riverside City colleges, as well as the seventeen Japanese students. As a whole, they registered the largest delegation RCCD has assembled and sent to an international conference.
The District's delegation competed as two teams, one representing Sweden, with the Japanese MUN students and the other representing Saudi Arabia, a team of exclusively RCC students.
In addition to winning the conference’s highest award, the Outstanding Delegation Award representing Sweden, and the Distinguished Delegation Award, representing Saudi Arabia, the joint RCCD/Japanese universities team also claimed the following prestigious individual awards.
• Best Delegate-Saudi Arabia - Rhiannon Rashidi, Daxia Tilghman, Marwah Ghouli
• Position Paper-Saudi Arabia- Rhiannon Rashidi
• Position Paper-Sweden - Nico Hughes, Caresse Boulter
This delegation is the youngest and most diverse MUN team that has represented RCCD’s MUN program. The team’s officers include head delegates 17-year Palestinian American student Marwah Ghouli and 20-year-old Zachary Sandoval and two young bright leaders Iffet Dogan and Jake White.
Faculty advisors Kendralyn Webber, Ph.D. and Dariush Haghighat, Ph.D. mentored the successful team virtually.
“These dedicated young people did not allow any challenges serve as an excuse for not living up to our MUN program’s proud tradition of commitment to the excellence,” Haghighat professor of Political Science said. “They never wavered and they never took their eyes off the target.”
International Model United Conference, which is normally held in New York City, brought together thousands of university and college students, more than half from outside the United States, to discuss global issues in a real world context.
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