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

To the Admissions Committee MSc Technology and Public Policy, Imperial College London I am writing in support of the applicant's application to the MSc Technology and Public Policy programme. I supervised their undergraduate thesis over approximately eight months, and I can speak directly to their analytical development, their capacity to work at the intersection of technical and policy reasoning, and their readiness for postgraduate study at this level. I first met the applicant when they enrolled in my upper-level module on AI systems and governance. What drew my attention early was not simply that they completed the work competently — many students do — but that they asked questions in seminar that pushed against the framing of the problem rather than accepting it. In one session on algorithmic accountability frameworks, most students engaged with the assigned reading on its own terms. The applicant raised a pointed objection: that the framework we were discussing treated model transparency as a proxy for accountability without examining whether transparency was legible to the decision-makers who were supposed to use it. That is a methodologically precise observation, and it is the kind of thing I do not expect from a third-year undergraduate without prompting. That instinct carried into the thesis. The applicant chose to examine how AI implementation decisions are made within public-sector organisations — a topic that sits uncomfortably between computer science and public administration, and one that requires the researcher to be honest about the limits of both. In our early supervision meetings, I found that the applicant's technical fluency was genuine: they understood the systems they were writing about and did not rely on vague claims about algorithmic complexity. What needed more work was the analytical bridge between empirical observation and policy inference. Their first full draft drew reasonable conclusions from their data, but the reasoning moved too quickly from what organisations were doing to what they should do. I pushed back on this in writing and in two extended supervision sessions. The revision they produced three weeks later showed real engagement with that critique — not just cosmetic changes, but a restructured argument that separated descriptive findings from normative claims and was explicit about the evidentiary limits of each. That revision process is, in my view, the most reliable indicator I have of a student's postgraduate potential. It is easy to produce good work when the path is clear. What matters is whether a student can receive a substantive methodological challenge, sit with the discomfort of it, and produce something more rigorous rather than simply more defensive. The applicant did that. I should be honest about one area where I think further development is warranted. The applicant's strongest instincts are applied and contextual — they think well when anchored to a concrete case or implementation scenario. When the work required more abstract theoretical engagement, particularly in situating their findings within broader debates in science and technology studies, the writing became less assured. This is not unusual for a student coming from an AI systems background, and it is precisely the kind of gap that a programme like Imperial's MSc Technology and Public Policy is designed to address. I do not raise it as a disqualifying concern; I raise it because I think the applicant will benefit from being pushed in that direction, and I expect they will respond to it well. The applicant's applied project work — particularly their governance memo analysing AI deployment decisions — demonstrated an ability to translate technical analysis into structured policy argument. That is a skill that is harder to teach than it looks, and it is directly relevant to what this programme asks of its students. I recommend the applicant with confidence. They have the technical grounding, the analytical seriousness, and the demonstrated capacity for self-correction that postgraduate work at this level requires. I am happy to discuss my assessment further if that would be useful to the committee. Yours sincerely,