Being a United Nations Delegate

This summer I found myself once again without a job in New York. This is not a particularly comfortable situation: rent is rough; everything is expensive; searching for jobs is the worst. But in a spate of info interviews someone offered me the opportunity to go intern/volunteer by monitoring and writing reports about meetings going on at the United Nations. The rational part of my brain told me not to spend any time doing anything that would not pay me money. But my inner Model UN delegate jumped at the chance to enter the halls of the United Nations and sit alongside diplomats from around the globe. I realized the hundreds of hours I spent doing Model United Nations in college might actually have some value in my life.

I knew that an opportunity to be at the United Nations and see international diplomacy firsthand amidst the discussions on the Sustainable Development Goals would be a valuable and exciting experience. Being a true international relations nerd I was unduly excited about these discussions because these Sustainable Development Goals are deeply intertwined with the global and national policy decisions that affect the kinds of grassroots development projects I had previously worked on. But I was still afraid this flight of fancy would get in the way of my job search and cause my own life to fall into financial disarray.

But, probably disregarding better judgment, I went for it.

I spent about a month monitoring and analyzing the High Level Political Forum and Intergovernmental Negotiations on the Sustainable Development Goals, which culminated in a series of late night weekend meetings before a final document was approved. That resolution will be voted on at the General Assembly in September and hopefully have far reaching consequences for global poverty. I wore a suit more often than I ever had before in my life and I read a lot of Twitter while the Nigerian delegate delivered long soliloquies about how "reproductive rights don't exist."

For maybe the first time since college I actually felt I was doing thoughtful analysis and being forced to think strategically about big issues on a daily basis. It felt good to think, to ask questions and do research into complex issues again. So much of my other jobs had been administrative and organizational challenges that required not much more than basic computer skills and a detailed to-do list. But at the United Nations I felt myself drawing on everything I had studied in order to understand the opaque language of the debates going on in front of me. It felt good to listen, research, decipher and advise my boss about advocacy targets.

Now I have a real job and I don't wear a suit. I'm no longer making off with the free sandwiches provided by the Federal Republic of Germany and I've fallen behind on the twitterverse. But for a few weeks I got to play diplomat a little more realistically than I had at all those weekend Model UN conferences in college.