With HNMUN, Lee says he hoped he would experience something akin to an actual UN conference.

But he was disillusioned by the actual events of the weekend.

"All we were doing was babysitting college students," he recalls, "and we could not even do that well because college students will not take other college students seriously.

" I felt as though a lot of guys were there just to schmooze and meet to girls," he adds.

The Institute of Politics (IOP), too, was a letdown for Lee.

He summarizes the organization's committee meetings as nothing more than "30 eager-beaver freshmen" jockeying to be part of the IOP's Student Advisory Committee.

The meetings, he says, were "totally unproductive."

Instead of meaningful experiences in political service, the IOP positions, he felt, were simply empty leadership titles.

"The IOP attracts only a certain type of student and repels those who might have a budding interest, but who are scared off by the over-competitiveness of the place," Lee wrote in the e-mail.

When Lee recognized his dissatisfaction with these organizations, he began looking for one better suited to his objectives.

He found the Weatherhead Center's student council, which has no professional staff, and so allows its member students far more autonomy than Lee found in the IOP committees.

The Weatherhead Center, says Lee, allows him "to deal with issues I feel are substantive and interesting, and try to educate people on international relations."

Recently, for instance, Lee helped to plan an event which included a colonel who had been a peacekeeper in Bosnia and an Emmy-winning Nieman fellow. They discussed the role of the press in the Bosnian conflict.

"We deal with much less bureaucracy," he says. "It does not have the competition of the IOP, and [the students] do a lot of the work."

Though he may appear apathetic compared to many of his campus cohorts, Lee has sought an outlet for his altruistic impulses off-campus. He also volunteers for the Boston chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, in an attempt to "move off the campus and its comps," he says.

Lee says he finally realized that if he "wanted to deal with real people on real-world issues, I would have to pull myself away from [the more public] political organizations."