The American Model United Nations Conference may be in November every year, but the preparation for it happens all year round.

For representatives and faculty advisors, the country assignment lottery and the Committee on the Agenda meeting are highlights looking toward the next year. In the winter, you’re debriefing from Conference and evaluating your time at AMUN. In the spring, you might be seeking funding from your school or running fundraisers. There’s probably a lull over the summer. Then by the time you arrive in Chicago in November, you’ve probably been working on research and rules and logistics and country-preparation for most of the fall.

Behind the scenes, AMUN staffers are hard at work all year round as well—we’ve taken to calling this #AMUNAllYear. In the winter, the Executive Committee begins its major planning for the year. In the spring, AMUN staffers are busy researching and writing the topic background guides for the Issues at AMUN handbook, which will be published in the fall. Over Memorial Day weekend, our Conference leaders meet for a training weekend and to think about how to implement innovations to make the coming Conference as good as it can be. Over the summer, our leaders work on editing all of the documents you’ll see at Conference and preparing to train our all-volunteer staff. We gather all of our staff members in Chicago over Labor Day weekend for training and team-building, and it’s full steam ahead until November. The week of Conference we go into high gear; our volunteer staff moves all of our computers and equipment into the Sheraton and goes through another day and a half of training before we go live.

There’s someone thinking about and working on AMUN every day of the year, and we’re working on some major projects this summer. (Don’t worry, we’ll continue to update the blog and our Facebook and Twitter feeds, and we might even fit a vacation or two in there somewhere.) We hope that this shows when you attend our Conference. Be sure and update your contact information if it’s changed, and have a great summer. Let us know if you have questions by emailing mail@amun.org. Stay tuned for some exciting announcements about this year’s Conference—we’ll be rolling out some changes based on your feedback and to improve access to our materials.