Pomona College is used to weekend visitors – prospective students, parents and even the occasional yearbook photo shoots. None of them, however, can quite compare to the energy that’s created when 200 teenagers show up on campus dressed like ambassadors, ready to debate international law.
This year, the Pomona College Model United Nations (PCMUN) club hosted SageMUN, giving new life to Model UN at the 5Cs. On Oct. 4, high school delegations from across Southern California convened at the 5Cs for a crash course in diplomacy, policy and college life. For one day, ordinary classrooms were transformed into diplomatic battlegrounds, and high school students became world leaders.
In these simulations, students represent countries as they work together in committees to solve past and present global crises. The PCMUN team believes that conducting these mock sessions of international diplomacy can foster greater cultural understanding, political respect and global awareness.
Previously, SageMUN had an entirely different structure: The conference welcomed fewer delegations and was more focused on college students. This year, however, Secretary General Gabriel Dalton PO ’26 and his team worked hard to reshape the event.
“We’ve kind of grown and fostered this thing into something it really wasn’t before. So I think we feel something weirdly enough, a kind of personal attachment to it,” Dalton said.
Secretary General Akshay Seetharam HM ’27 explained that he first stepped into the SageMUN scene in Spring 2024, when it was still a college-level event.
“It was beset by quite a bit of chaos,” Seetharam said. “One committee had to be entirely canceled due to drops, and we had to put PCMUN members into committees to make up for drops.”
After that tumultuous weekend, the PCMUN team decided they needed to take a step back to re-evaluate.
Since its founding in 2013, the club has weathered staffing problems and the COVID pandemic, which culminated in years of low turnout and organizational chaos.
The team slowly concluded that the multi-day college-level format was no longer sustainable. High school teams, on the other hand, were eager and local, looking for something smaller than the big settings at UCLA or USC.
Together, Seetharam and Dalton decided to build the conference from scratch. With zero contacts, they cold-called high schools, emailed outdated lists and pieced together committees while writing their own background guides. They reshaped SageMUN into a one-day, beginner-friendly event, giving the conference a new identity.
“Because we’re a smaller conference, we’ve kind of positioned ourselves to be a little more beginner-friendly,” Dalton said. “For a lot of kids, it’s actually the very first MUN conference.”
This openness is reflected in the committee chairs: PCMUN members who are responsible for managing the committees by gently guiding newcomers through each step. Each committee chair approaches their work with openness, taking care to treat confusion not as failure but as part of the natural process of learning parliamentary procedure. Fumbling a motion is not a catastrophe — it’s a right of passage.
At the same time, the Pomona campus itself became part of SageMUN’s draw. Dalton explained his surprise when visiting high school teachers, acting as advisors to their students, insisted on taking their delegation to a dining hall so students could experience that slice of college life.
Many organizers also felt the impact of this shift in marketing SageMUN as an opportunity for high school students. For Diana Braghis PO ’26 — a veteran PCMUN member and chair of this year’s Succession Crisis Committee, the change was almost unbelievable.
Seeing high schoolers spread across campus, scribbling notes on steps outside classrooms or rushing between committees, changed everything. The number of attendees more than doubled in one year — in 2024 there were 85, whereas this year PCMUN welcomed 170 students.
“I said, ‘oh wow,’ SageMUN has reached the level of a real conference,” Braghis said. “This is why we do it.”
As chair of the Succession Crisis Committee, Braghis runs a special type of Model UN event: Instead of focusing on a single topic, it runs on two simultaneous tracks that keep delegates constantly balancing strategy and diplomacy. As their conference has pivoted to target younger, less experienced MUNers, Braghis and her crisis staff have learned to provide more guidance, aware that most students are going through this process for the first time.
“We kept asking: do you have questions, how can we help you, do you need any explanations?” Braghis said. “We walked them through how to do Model UN, but also how to do Model UN in the Crisis style during the conference itself.”
After a full day of crisis committees, delegate speeches, dining hall visits and more, Seetharam and Dalton described the rewarding feeling of stepping into the closing ceremonies, knowing that their hard work had paid off. As the sun set on Pomona College’s campus, the Rose Hills Theater at Pomona College was filled with delegates, the room swelling with chatter, nervous whispers and the steady thrum of anticipation.
Unexpected, a little unhinged, and fully committed — this energy carried straight into the final minutes of the conference. And for the ending, there was noise, chaos and extreme joy.
“Some of the kids were literally screaming,” Dalton said.
When he tossed out a casual “see you in 2026?” the room erupted. It was a moment of pure affirmation: this was no longer a fragile experiment. What began as an uncertain project has quickly become a landmark event in the history of PCMUN.
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