U-High’s Model UN team members remain hopeful in their ability to defend the “tiger” at the upcoming Princeton Model UN Conference on Nov. 16-19, in spite of their abnormally substandard showing at the Vanderbilt Model UN Conference Oct. 20-22.

“I think there was some room for improvement,” treasurer Jamal Nimer, a junior, said. “We brought a lot of freshmen this year, which kind of hurt our performance as a team.”

However, the team goes to the Vanderbilt conference in order to give the freshmen experience and understands that some of their strategies may need to change for the upcoming conferences.

“Going forward, we will have to be more strategic in our placement of freshmen in committees, so that we can get the most amount of awards as possible,” Jamal said.

Even in spite of their comparatively poor performance at VUMUN, Teresa Xie, a senior and one of the Secretaries General, said the members are still confident in their ability to perform at the Princeton conference.

“Last year, we won the tiger, meaning we won best large delegation, which is the ultimate goal,” Teresa said. “I think that having that incentive from last year and shows competitive schools we can beat them, and it’s a really good push for us to do well this year.”