Imperial Recommendation Letter Example: Communications student vague media vs platform policy (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 how they think, how they handle criticism, and where they have grown. I first encountered the applicant in a third-year seminar on platform governance and media regulation. The course asked students to map regulatory frameworks across jurisdictions, and most submissions stayed close to the assigned readings. The applicant's memo on media versus platform policy stood out not because it was polished — it was not, initially — but because it identified a genuine tension that the seminar had not foregrounded: the question of whether legacy broadcast regulation categories are analytically coherent when applied to algorithmic content curation. That observation was underdeveloped in the memo, but it was the applicant's own, and it suggested an instinct for locating where existing frameworks strain under new conditions. That instinct became more visible during thesis supervision. The applicant's project examined how AI governance proposals in two jurisdictions handled the classification of high-risk systems, drawing on policy document analysis and a structured comparison of regulatory impact assessments. In our early meetings, the applicant's methods were imprecise in a way I see often with communications students moving toward policy analysis: they were comfortable with discourse and framing but less confident about how to operationalise a comparison so that it could bear analytical weight. I pushed back on the initial coding scheme, which conflated definitional scope with enforcement mechanism in ways that would have made the comparison difficult to interpret. The applicant's response to that critique is what I want the committee to understand. They did not defend the original design out of attachment to it. They asked clarifying questions, went away, and returned two weeks later with a revised framework that separated the two dimensions and added a third — institutional locus of accountability — that I had not suggested. That revision showed genuine methodological reasoning, not just compliance with feedback. The final thesis was competent rather than exceptional. The empirical sections were stronger than the theoretical framing, and the applicant acknowledged in the conclusion that the comparison would benefit from primary interview data that time and access constraints had made impossible. I thought that acknowledgement was honest and showed appropriate calibration about what the evidence could and could not support. The analytical core — the comparison of classification logic across the two regulatory texts — held up, and the applicant defended it clearly in the viva when pressed on scope. What I think the applicant brings to a programme like Imperial's MSc is a genuine interest in the intersection of technology governance and communication infrastructure, combined with a demonstrated willingness to work at the boundary of their existing methods training. The communications and media analysis background is real preparation for understanding how policy is constructed and contested in public discourse. The applied AI governance project, though early-stage, showed the applicant beginning to engage with technical regulatory concepts — risk classification, liability allocation, audit requirements — that are central to the programme they are applying to. I want to be direct about one limitation. The applicant's quantitative and technical policy analysis skills are still developing. Their strength is in qualitative and comparative work. A programme that moves quickly into technical regulatory modelling or economic analysis of technology markets will require them to build on a foundation that is not yet fully in place. I do not think this is a disqualifying gap — it is a predictable one given their undergraduate training — but it is something the applicant and the programme should both be clear-eyed about. I recommend the applicant for this programme. The evidence I have is from coursework and thesis supervision, and within that scope I found them to be a serious, intellectually honest student who improves under rigorous feedback. I believe the MSc Technology and Public Policy is a reasonable and well-motivated next step for them. Yours sincerely [Date]