Cambridge Recommendation Letter Example: AI applicant deciding technical research or governance (Score 92)

Department of Technology and Public Policy [University Name] [Date] To the Admissions Committee, MPhil in Environmental Policy, University of Cambridge I am writing in my capacity as Associate Professor of Technology and Public Policy at [University], where I supervised the applicant's undergraduate thesis over approximately nine months. I have supervised capstone projects across several cohorts, and I want to be direct: this applicant's work stands out not because of its polish, but because of the quality of judgment it revealed under pressure. The thesis examined governance frameworks for algorithmic decision-making in public-sector contexts — territory that sits at the intersection of technical systems and policy design. What I noticed early was that the applicant did not treat these as separate domains requiring separate vocabularies. In our first substantive supervision meeting, when I pushed back on a framing that conflated model transparency with regulatory accountability, the applicant did not retreat to safer ground. Instead, they asked a clarifying question that reframed the problem more precisely than my own challenge had. That kind of response — neither defensive nor merely compliant — is not common at this stage. The second scene I want to describe is from roughly the midpoint of the project. The applicant had drafted a policy memo section analysing how existing AI governance instruments in two jurisdictions handled environmental data classification. The draft was technically competent but analytically thin: it catalogued differences without explaining what those differences revealed about underlying regulatory assumptions. I returned it with fairly direct comments to that effect. What followed over the next two weeks was a genuine revision, not a cosmetic one. The applicant restructured the comparative analysis around a causal argument, identified a gap in the secondary literature that the original draft had missed, and came to the next meeting with a written note explaining which of my comments they had accepted, which they had modified, and one they had decided to push back on — with reasons. That last part mattered to me. The ability to disagree with a supervisor on evidential grounds, rather than simply absorbing feedback, is a marker of intellectual independence that I look for and rarely see this clearly. On methods: the applicant is comfortable with qualitative policy analysis and has demonstrated real ability in synthesising technical and regulatory evidence. The research analysis component of the thesis showed careful source evaluation and a willingness to acknowledge where the evidence was genuinely ambiguous rather than forcing a cleaner conclusion. That said, I would note that the applicant's exposure to quantitative environmental modelling or formal policy evaluation methods is narrower than their qualitative work. This is not a disqualifying gap for a programme like the Cambridge MPhil in Environmental Policy, but it is something the applicant will need to address actively in the first term. I raise it because I think it is honest and because I have seen the applicant respond well to exactly this kind of structured challenge. The applicant's move toward environmental policy governance is, from my observation, a considered one rather than an opportunistic pivot. The AI governance work they completed was consistently oriented toward the downstream social and regulatory consequences of technical systems — not toward the systems themselves as objects of optimisation. That orientation maps naturally onto the questions the Cambridge programme addresses, particularly around the governance of emerging technologies in environmental and climate contexts. I do not think this is a student who has simply added 'environmental' to a pre-existing interest in AI; the analytical thread runs in the other direction. In terms of working style: the applicant met every agreed deadline across the supervision period, managed a substantial independent research component without requiring structural intervention from me, and communicated clearly when they encountered a problem rather than letting it accumulate. These are not small things in a nine-month independent project. I would be glad to supervise this applicant again, and I would welcome the opportunity to discuss their work further if that would be useful to the committee. Yours sincerely, Associate Professor of Technology and Public Policy [Department], [University] [Date]