Cambridge Recommendation Letter Example: Economics student vague development vs trade policy (Score 92)

I am an Associate Professor of Economics and Finance at , and I write to support the applicant's candidacy for the MPhil in Public Policy at Cambridge. I supervised the applicant's undergraduate dissertation over approximately eight months, from initial proposal through final submission, and I also taught them in a third-year module on trade and development. My assessment is based on direct, sustained observation rather than a single course interaction. The applicant came to me with a broad interest in development economics and an initial instinct to frame their dissertation around trade policy. That framing was, at first, underspecified — the early proposal memo conflated trade liberalisation arguments with structural development concerns in ways that are common among undergraduates but that needed to be resolved before any serious empirical work could begin. What I found encouraging was not that the applicant arrived with a polished question, but that they responded well when I pushed back. In our second supervision meeting, I asked them to identify precisely which causal mechanism they were testing and to explain why their chosen data source could speak to it. They returned the following week with a revised framing that was noticeably tighter. That kind of iterative self-correction — not just accepting a comment but actually reworking the underlying logic — is less common at this stage than one might hope. The dissertation itself drew on a development and trade analysis the applicant had completed in a prior module, and they were able to extend that earlier work into a more structured applied project. The empirical section was competent rather than sophisticated: the applicant used a difference-in-differences specification and engaged seriously with the parallel trends assumption, though I would note that their handling of heterogeneous treatment effects was limited, and I had to direct them toward the relevant literature rather than having them identify it independently. This is an honest gap. The applicant is not yet a fully autonomous researcher in the methods sense, and the dissertation reflects the level of a strong undergraduate rather than someone who has already crossed into graduate-level independent inquiry. I flag this not to diminish the work but because I think it is relevant to how Cambridge supervisors should calibrate expectations at entry. A second scene that stays with me occurred during a departmental seminar the applicant attended in the spring term. A visiting speaker presented on preferential trade agreements and distributional effects in lower-income economies — territory adjacent to the applicant's dissertation. During the Q&A, the applicant asked a question about the counterfactual construction in the speaker's identification strategy. It was a genuine methodological question, not a performance, and the speaker engaged with it substantively. I mention this because it illustrated something I had observed in supervisions: the applicant reads critically and carries questions across contexts, which is a different skill from performing well on a structured assignment. On the question of fit for the MPhil in Public Policy specifically, I think the applicant's background in trade and development provides a reasonable foundation, though I would encourage the admissions committee to probe how clearly the applicant has mapped their development interests onto the policy analysis and governance dimensions of the Cambridge programme rather than the more technical economics track. The dissertation was economics-led; the applicant will need to demonstrate they can work across disciplinary registers at the MPhil level. In terms of personal qualities: the applicant is organised, meets deadlines, and handles critical feedback without becoming defensive. They are not the most naturally assertive student I have supervised, and in group settings they sometimes hold back observations that would have been worth sharing. That said, in one-to-one supervision they were consistently engaged and willing to be challenged. I would support this application. The applicant has the intellectual foundation and the disposition to develop into a capable graduate student. I would want any supervisor reading this to know that the work I observed was honest, effortful, and showed real growth over the supervision period — which, at undergraduate level, is the evidence I weight most heavily. Please feel free to contact me at if further information would be helpful. the applicant, [Title] [Department],