Optimistically, as much as possible. However, I know most people have other commitments such as exams or other extracurriculars. I wouldn’t spend too much time writing your position papers because they honestly don’t matter. Most conferences don’t give out a book award for the best paper and even if you get the award it’s honestly not that good.

Generally, I’ll spend an hour writing my position paper. I typically participate in double delegation committees so my partner writes the past action on each topic and I write the background. Then, we write the solutions together. The former two elements don’t matter. I would focus on developing your own original solutions instead.

I mentioned this in a previous post as well but the solutions you make are SO IMPORTANT. Please don’t make a shared global database your main idea. It’s overused and honestly not that impactful. You need to develop a solution that you can basically base your entire resolution paper on. I cannot stress this enough!

Overall I would say I spend 2-4 hours prepping before a conference. This can be divided into 1 hour for position papers, 1 hour for solutions, and 2ish hours for general research and speech writing. I’ll usually put a few unique stats that I can mention in an impromptu speech. However, if you don’t want to spend a ton of time you can just put 2-3 for each topic which shouldn’t take long.

If you can’t invest this much time in prepping for a Model UN conference then I would suggest doing an Ad Hoc committee. Here, you just have to show up to the conference. The topic is given to you on the spot.

Thank you for reading!