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87 All of this preparation—practice and research—comes together at the actual conference , when your students get to try out their newly honed skills. When debarking from your buses or vans, your students should already be in your team uniform—Western business attire and/or formal business costume for your adoptive country. We prefer black suits for our women, dark suits for our men. A flag lapel pin of your adoptive country is a nice touch. An excellent selection can be found by calling Abe Lincoln Flags, 8634 Lee Highway, Fairfax, Virginia, 22031, 703-201-1116. Once one of our delegates has won an award, we give them a bronze gavel pin, available from Anderson’s, P.O. Box 1151, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55440-1151, 1-800-848-0258. At registration, the sponsor should register the delegation, pick up badges and packets, which usually contain schedules, rules of procedure, school maps, lunch coupons, etc. Your delegates should not be lined up with you at the registration line. Rather, they should immediately begin chatting with the members of the Secretariat who will affect their committees (not just the Chairs and others on the dais, but other senior Secretariat members who might from time to time stop by, or are in charge of printing documents, etc.), and with the delegates from other schools who will be on their committees. Team members should have their “game face” on— they are no longer high schoolers, they are dedicated ambassadors from their country . Until they get back on the bus, they should never “break character.” They are always being evaluated at the conference. Part of how Michael Jordan became a winner is being the first in the gym and the last to leave. You should use the same mind-set: get there earlier than any other delegation and be the last delegation to leave. Your delegates can always be talking to somebody —staff, other delegates, coaches, each other, etc. Most of the work of MUNs— and parliamentary bodies in general—is conducted in corridors, not in formal sessions. Some conferences will host pre-kickoff parliamentary procedure workshops, to explain how rules of procedure work. If these sessions are offered, no matter 8 What to Do at a Conference how well-coached and experienced your delegates are regarding these particular rules, every one of your delegates (and you) should attend. You will learn how the Chairs have been told to interpret rules, have an opportunity to ask questions about ambiguous phrasing of the rules (you are virtually guaranteed to find loopholes), and get a chance to meet with the Chairs ahead of time. Team members may wish to print individualized business cards and delegation stationery. The former can have their name, school, country name, committee assignment, cell phone number, website(s), and e-mail addresses printed. The stationery is useful for the informal notes they will be passing to their colleagues. They may wish to write some notes ahead of time and fill in the name of the recipient delegation at the conference. As soon as you have finished with registration and have handed out badges, information packets, room keys, etc., you should do the following: • Huddle with your delegates to go over last-minute coaching hints (including any changes you note in the rules of procedure that you just received, versus the rules that you saw on their website or received via mail or in an e-mail). • Discuss what oddities in the rules your delegates should raise at the start of the committee meeting. • Discuss whether your delegates should call for a Moment of Silence at the beginning of the committee session to memorialize someone mentioned in the news that week (it could be a major international figure, individuals killed by terrorists, individuals victimized by natural disasters, etc.) or to note the anniversary of such an event. • Send your delegates to their committee rooms, where they should establish their territory. They should sit in the center chairs in the front row of the room or on the edges of the rows, but still in front. As mentioned earlier, the Chair can see them easier and thus call on them and have colloquies with them. It is easier for your delegates to run off for hallway caucusing from that position. It is also easier for your delegates to host an informal caucus of their region from that location. And you can find them easily in case of emergencies. Find out whether there are dead spots...

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