Josh Imhof | features editor

Hundreds of high school students travelled to Duquesne’s campus on Friday to participate in the university’s annual Model United Nations tournament. Students from high schools across Western Pennsylvania were invited to participate in the event and collaborated, debated and compromised on multiple real world issues.

Ayush Bharath, junior, and Lucky Aaluri, senior, made the two-hour trip from Fairview High School in Erie to compete.

Bharath, who said he had aspirations to become a doctor and work for the World Health Organization, represented India during the competition. He spent his time working on resolutions to provide humanitarian aid to Kashmir, a hot spot for conflict between India and Pakistan in real life.

“I learned more about the conflict and realized that there’s serious issues going on here, and the idea of just trying to fix the conflict and find ideas was really intriguing to me,” he said.

Because India and Pakistan are both nuclear armed states, one of Bharath’s goals was to establish a no first-use policy.

He said he found that collaboration is key when it comes to deliberation.

“I think communication is the first step to success,” Bharath said. “Building the communication network, building everything is kind of what we want to do, and that’s kind of where we are standing on that.”

The event broke down competitors into classes of novice, intermediate and advanced and covered a wide range of topics from climate change to nuclear waste disposal to mental health integration.

Srihitha Vulupala, a sophomore from South Fayette High School, represented Finland at the event and had to address the rise of counterfeit pharmaceuticals.

She proposed a resolution to create a database that would track pharmaceuticals digitally by putting them through checkpoints at each location they would stop at to catch contaminated products.

Vulupala used Finland’s real world policies to shape her approach to the event.

“I knew that [Finland has] very strong health policies and funding. So I thought maybe I would be able to write a resolution to help other countries implement similar policies,” she said.

Students conducted their research independently and were responsible for understanding their own and other countries’ perspectives on global issues. For some, this was the main draw of the event.

“Model U.N. is a great place to specifically learn about other areas of the world that you might not get to see on a daily basis,” said Andrew Kirkpatrick, senior at Pine-Richland High School. “Traditional U.S. and western sources only tend to report on things happening that directly affect us, but don’t typically have an outside scope … So definitely for me, the main role was the cultural aspect.”

Jonathan Valentin and Sue Nelson, both advisers for the Fairview High School Model U.N. team, said that this cultural exposure is important to students’ education.

“They’re getting the opportunity to put themselves in someone else’s shoes and research things from a different perspective than maybe what they’ve been exposed to before, sometimes even completely different than what they personally believe,” Valentin said.

They recently took their students on a field trip to the real life U.N. headquarters in New York City where they were able to observe actual deliberations. Nelson said this experience was impactful.

“Stepping into those rooms transformed our students,” she said. “They were mesmerized by delegations actively discussing things. I think that held real power for us.”

The program ended with an awards ceremony where the top delegates from each committee were recognized in the Union Ballroom. Valentin said that he hoped students would take the lessons they learned at the event beyond campus.

“I think it was important to understand that even if you have a bunch of people who maybe legitimately want to solve big issues, it’s very difficult,” Valentin said. “I would hope that these students would come away with a greater appreciation for the complexities of whatever the issues that they might be facing are.”

Josh Imhof can be reached at imhofj@duq.edu