TorreyMUN Celebrates 10th Anniversay
For the first time in its 10-year history, LJCDS’s Model United Nations team, TorreyMUN, hosted a standalone fall conference on Saturday, September 27, 2025, marking the first MUN competition of the season in the region. The one-day event attracted over 250 attendees, including delegates from 11 other schools across Southern California and Tijuana.
The immersive conference combines serious global education with dynamic student leadership. Committees are entirely student-chaired, and participants must not only debate but negotiate, write, and pass resolutions, all while staying in character, sometimes with props and costumes.
“TorreyMUN isn’t just about memorizing facts,” shares LJCDS MUN Advisor Fiona Halloran, Ph.D. “It’s about diplomacy, leadership, and finding your voice in a room full of ideas.”
For many, the event is more than a competition. It’s a launchpad for leadership, public speaking, and civic engagement, all grounded in the real-world skills students will carry far beyond high school.
As proof, Niki Nair ’20 and Matthew Wirtz ’20 were presented with awards during the closing ceremony. They were part of a group of founding members before becoming team presidents and mentors to bring more students into the MUN world.
“Seeing our alums from the founding era, Matthew and Niki,” shared Dr. Halloran, “brought home the reality that this year's teenagers are the doctors and entrepreneurs of tomorrow.”
Read more from The San Diego Union-Tribune below.
Country Day Model United Nations students put on a show at fall conference
TorreyMUN hosts nearly 250 students from 12 schools across San Diego County and Tijuana to tackle an array of contemporary and historical topics
By Noah Lyons
The San Diego Union-Tribune
October 4, 2025, at 1:00 PM PDT
Students at La Jolla Country Day School are no strangers to spirited debate of global issues. But this year there’s a difference.
TorreyMUN, the school’s student-run Model United Nations initiative, brought together nearly 250 students from 12 schools across San Diego County and Tijuana last weekend for the first fall conference hosted solely by the Country Day group.
TorreyMUN is described as a mix of policy debate and theater, with delegates negotiating, drafting and passing resolutions at conferences across the world, from Yale University to the Netherlands.
The Sept. 27 conference was the seventh event overall that the group, which first formed in 2015, has hosted or co-hosted since 2020, many of them alongside The Preuss School in La Jolla under the name T&T MUN.
La Jolla Country Day students Steven Tao and Tanish Khanna, TorreyMUN’s co-secretary generals, ran and coordinated the event. Steven, a senior, said the group had a short turnaround time following its previous event in March.
“We started planning immediately in March for the September conference,” he said. “Me and my team spent pretty much all summer planning, coordinating, [doing] lots of … meetings just to prepare for a conference that pretty much kicked off as soon as school started.”
The event featured 10 committee sessions covering topics ranging from nuclear energy and freedom of the press to historical scenarios such as patriots and loyalists discussing the American Revolution and the U.N. Security Council convening to discuss the Gulf War.
Fiona Halloran, a TorreyMUN faculty adviser since 2019, said students “were eager to talk. Sometimes students can seem shy, but these delegates jumped right into collaboration and debated. They celebrated each other and sought to work together to find solutions in a way that showed how much they respected the potential of their peers.”
Read the full article on The San Diego Union-Tribune website.
Read the full article on The San Diego Union-Tribune website.
