LSE Recommendation Letter Example: Anthropology student with vague development interest (Score 92)

Department of Anthropology and Development Studies [University Name] [Date] To the Admissions Committee MSc Public Policy and Social Impact London School of Economics and Political Science I am writing in support of the applicant's application to the MSc Public Policy and Social Impact at LSE. I supervised their undergraduate dissertation over approximately nine months, and that sustained working relationship gives me a reasonably clear picture of how they think, how they respond to difficulty, and where they are headed intellectually. I should say at the outset that I do not write this kind of letter routinely. I agreed to do so here because the applicant's trajectory over the course of the project was genuinely notable — not because the work was flawless, but because of the quality of the intellectual movement I observed. The dissertation examined livelihood strategies in a peri-urban settlement, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork alongside a quantitative component the applicant designed independently. The quantitative strand was not required by the brief, and I was initially sceptical about whether it would add analytical weight or simply sit alongside the ethnographic material without doing real work. What changed my view was a supervision meeting roughly four months in, when the applicant walked me through a spatial disaggregation of household survey data they had constructed to test whether proximity to a service corridor correlated with reported income diversification. The framing was imperfect — the causal logic needed tightening — but the instinct to reach for a method that could stress-test an ethnographic pattern rather than simply illustrate it struck me as analytically mature for an undergraduate. We spent the better part of that session working through what the data could and could not support, and the applicant engaged with those limits directly rather than defending the original framing. A second moment I want to describe came later in the process, during a draft review in which I returned a chapter with fairly substantial structural comments. The ethnographic analysis was rich but the policy implications were underworked — the applicant had treated the development intervention they were studying as context rather than as an object of analysis in its own right. I expected some resistance; the chapter had clearly taken considerable effort. Instead, the applicant came back two weeks later with a revised section that reframed the intervention as a governance mechanism and drew on secondary literature I had not suggested. That kind of self-directed course correction is not something I can teach directly. It reflects a disposition toward the material that I think will serve them well in a programme that asks students to move between analytical frameworks and applied policy questions. I want to be honest about one limitation. The applicant's engagement with formal policy analysis as a discipline — as distinct from development anthropology — was relatively thin at the time of the dissertation. Their instincts were strong, but the vocabulary and conceptual toolkit of public policy studies were not yet fully developed. I do not regard this as a disqualifying gap; it is precisely the kind of gap that a well-structured MSc is designed to address. But I mention it because I think the applicant will need to invest early in the programme's more technical policy analysis components, and I would encourage them to do so actively rather than relying on the ethnographic strengths that come more naturally. In terms of intellectual qualities more broadly: the applicant reads carefully, writes with more precision than is common at this level, and is willing to sit with complexity rather than resolve it prematurely. They are not the loudest presence in a seminar room, but in one-to-one supervision they asked questions that were genuinely probing rather than performative. I believe the applicant has the analytical foundation and the intellectual seriousness that LSE's MSc Public Policy and Social Impact demands. I recommend them with confidence. Yours sincerely, Associate Professor, [Department] [University] [Email] | [Phone]