My name is Nicolas Lopez. I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but I moved to Colombia when I was a year old. I did all my primary and secondary education in Colombian, Spanish-speaking institutions, and never got the chance to learn about U.S. politics, history, or current issues. When I came to Westminster College, MO, to pursue my higher education, I had to go through a hard period of linguistic, cultural, and academic transition. However, one of the issues that I felt most strongly was the political de-engagement that I was experiencing. Back in Colombia, I was a politically active person; I participated in missions of electoral transparency, I closely followed the legislature and state of corruption in the Colombian congress, and I routinely engaged in conversations with friends about social and political issues; things that I completely left behind once I came to the United States, but that I felt the need to get back on.

My participation in Up to Us as an executive member of the Global Development and Progress club definitely took me back into political activism. Since our club was spearheading the Up to Us competition during the fall semester at our college, the level of engagement that I had in this competition was somehow overwhelming, but at the same time extremely valuable. On the first stages of the competition, prior to My Two Cents Day, our group spent hours meeting and discussing the strategies that we were going to use in order to achieve at the highest during the 24-hour event. Our club was very lucky that the Westminster community was very supportive, and we obtained a lot of ideas and volunteers from members of our newly formed club. The results really blew our expectations and demonstrated to us that the collective effort made by numerous hard-working individuals allowed us to be in the first place of the competition in percentage of students involved.

The second stage of the competition has been more consuming, challenging, and requiring a higher effort from us to achieve the desired first place. However, beyond the prize and the prestige of winning the competition, I see that our most powerful inspiration to succeed was the support and involvement that we received from our community during My Two Cents Day; thus putting our college at the highest of the final round was our moral devoir with Westminster. For this reason, I see that the hours that each one of our group members spent, and the astonishing creativity and involvement resulting from it, have been effects of the massive support that we received from faculty and fellow students. As a result, the Up to Us group decided to have 3 major events, along with some minor educational campaigns during the three-week period of the competition. The three major events started with a game called “The Inequality Games”, in which we were trying to show the effects of income distribution in a nation’s growth and debt. This was followed by an intense debate between two well-known political science professors, arguing about the role of defense expenditure on the national debt. Finally, we had a national budget simulation with the participation of high school students as part of the Missouri community, as well as Westminster students. Each one of these events was designed within a task group, which consisted of a main organizer and group of volunteers that helped with the preparation. Along with this, we had one task group that focused specifically on marketing the Up to Us competition as a whole, as well as every single event that we were having. The result of this effort was very similar as in My Two Cents Day: a large portion of our college participating and creating conversation around the U.S. national debt.

On a personal level, Up to Us signified much more than a mere competition. It represented my comeback into political issues, this time in the new country that I am thrilled to call home. But it also taught me very valuable educational and life lessons, because at the end, it was the team-working and collective effort that inspired each one of us to give the most in this competition, and to put the name of our beloved college at the highest level. For that reason, I would like to sincerely thank each one of the executive members of our club, who in every instant supported each other in moments when classes, projects, and exams seemed to overshadow Up to Us, but in the end the support was great enough as to not let us give up. I also would like to thank our faculty, especially our academic advisor and our Model UN professor, who made significant contributions and helped with their knowledge and experience to allow us to finalize our events with the involvement and outcomes that we were expecting.