Seton Hall Model UN Team Breaks into Top 25 in Nationwide Rankings

Luisa Chainferber
Senior Correspondent

The Seton Hall United Nations Association (SHUNA) Model United Nations team reached the Top 25 for the North American Fall 2019 College Model United Nations ranking for the first time in team history, reports Best Delegate. The Seton Hall team now ranks number 12 out of more than a hundred competing teams.

According to the rankings, Seton Hall finished second at the Specialized Crisis Simulation at Yale, behind only the University of Pennsylvania. Additionally, Seton Hall also recently won an award at the Boston Area United Nations Conference.

The ranking explained that a change in the weighted score methodology helped push Seton Hall’s ranking up. With the change, the weighting gap between small and large conferences decreased, which benefited SHUNA.

Despite not being in the top 25 in previous years, Seton Hall’s Model UN team was nonetheless consistently among the upper part of the ranking. For example, as Best Delegate notes, the team was in the top 75 for the 2017-2018 academic year.  During the 2016-2017 year, Seton Hall was in the top 50.

Stephen Hoffman, the President of the team, noted that it was a pleasant surprise that Seton Hall made it to number 12. “While our goal was to be in the top 25, we did not even imagine being so close to the top 10,” he said.

Explaining the success of the team this year, Hoffman mentioned that excellent work by the current freshman class was a major factor for these positive results. He also emphasized that the club worked on its student body retention rate and that the club now has fifteen active sophomore students and a total of 40 active members. Through SHUNA’s mentorship program, students can develop the skills to succeed along with the SHUNA team.

Elena Soisson, SHUNA’s Treasurer, also expressed her joy with the new ranking. “I am very proud of how much our team has expanded,” she said, “We are now attending more conferences per semester than in previous years.”

In the spring semester alone, SHUNA will participate in five more conferences. The first one will be MUNE, Model United Nations at Emory University, from February 6 to February 9, which will be the first conference that SHUNA will fly to. Afterward, SHUNA plans to attend the following conferences: Princeton Diplomatic Invitational, the Five College Model United Nations Conference from Mount Holyoke University, Pennsylvania United Nations at Penn State University, and MUN at the College of William and Mary.

Hoffman and Soisson expressed hope that this positive trend will continue and encouraged more students to join SHUNA. “I have used SHUNA to market my public speaking and teamwork skills,” Soisson noted, “and so can any student who joins us, even if they are not a Diplomacy major.”