LOR for student applying to Msc Data science

lettef of recommendation

Dear Admissions Team,

I am writing this letter to recommend XXX for admission to the master's program at your prestigious university.
As a professor and Head of the Statistics Department at XXX, I have known XXX for a couple of years since 2018 when I was the research supervisor of her scientific research for submission to the research competition for college students across Vietnam in 2018-2019 academic year.

The focus of her research is analyzing the relationship between economic growth and tourism development in Vietnam using econometrics. She showed a good understanding of how to conduct research using quantitative and qualitative methods. In the study, she was able to gather and clean time series data as inputs used in the statistical model. Then, she performed the descriptive statistical analysis, visualized them with suitable charts, and interpreted their meaning to explain the overall trends of each variable. Moreover, besides implementing basic statistical concepts, she was capable of studying advanced knowledge on her own and decided to use the Granger-Casuality test to find out the answer to the research question.

Through this research, she proved herself as a curious student who possessed a strong passion for learning and conducting deep research into a specific topic. Since this was new research with few reports from a Vietnamese perspective, she followed my instructions to read relevant foreign research and even went beyond the number of studies I recommended for the literature review. Not only got exceptional grades in Statistics courses, but she also successfully applied what we taught students in class to this real-life example. In addition, she could construct a logical methodology: to analyze the current state of the economy and tourism industry, collect data from trustworthy sources, develop and test models as well as propose potential solutions to solve problems identified in the research.

Aside from technique knowledge, XXX also strongly impressed me with her time management skill and the ability to work productively and independently under a tight deadline. In the research competition, she was one of the few fourth-year participants who could complete the research in time while managing her internship at Company XX and writing her graduation thesis. With this research, she was selected to represent the Faculty to join the competition for all students in our college and eventually got the honorable mention by the school.

For all of the aforementioned reasons, I am honored to give XXX my recommendation for your rigorous master's program. With the knowledge and skills demonstrated in her research, I have faith that she would be a valuable asset to your establishment.

Best regards,

A letter of recommendation for a masters course often comes with a prompt from the university the student is applying to. The prompt includes particular areas of character, academic acumen, academic weaknesses, ability to function under pressure, among others. A letter of recommendation should be well rounded and should not only focus on the positive and perceived strong abilities of the student. That is because the student is being reflected upon by the professor, who should know better than to focus only on one research project and how the student went about that task, or the competition the student participated in. The professor would not actually focus on those qualifiers since those are information a student, not a professor would find important. The essay lacks the focus on the aspects I previously mentioned, indicative of the student writing the essay rather than the balanced point of view that a professor would apply to the letter.