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Peter Kappas (center), head delegate Justin Seuthe, team member Marguerite Sanvictores

Fresh Laurels for Fierce Young Model U.N. Diplomats

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Celebrating CSUN team’s back-to-back first place wins at the Model U.N. competition: advisor Peter Kappas (center), head delegate Justin Seuthe, team member Marguerite Sanvictores

CSUN’s Model United Nations team once again showed up prepared to the gills. Once again, it walked away the winner at the National Model U.N. (MUN) competition in New York. Once again, it proved advisor Peter Kappas’ point: there are no short cuts to the top.

At the spring 2007 competition in the U.N. Building, about a dozen tough, intellectually aggressive young students—the products of political science professor Kappas’ intensive two-semester MUN course in applied diplomacy—scored the Outstanding Delegation honor, the equivalent of first place. The team also took the Outstanding Position Papers award.

At the spring 2008 competition, it repeated the feat.

Representing Afghanistan, CSUN’s team competed against more than 3,000 students from universities in the U.S. and abroad, all presenting the positions of a variety of countries or organizations. At the end of the day, Northridge not only won the top overall honor, but head delegate Justin Seuthe and teammate Jorge Guerrero drew individual recognitions as “best single delegation” in their 300-delegate committee, the General Assembly Plenary.

For the past six years, Kappas has prepared the Northridge MUN students to do diplomatic battle in New York with top teams from colleges and universities worldwide. The students eat, sleep and dream world issues, this year spending the entire January vacation break writing position papers and immersing themselves in issues of importance to Afghanistan, from illegal arms trade to nuclear materials management.

Learning how to write “precisely and concisely” comes with the territory for these young diplomats, said Kappas, an ardent advocate of deep preparation. His CSUN teams do the work and then some. At competition time, it shows.