Respected University Admissions Board:

Since his joining Sun Microsystems China Engineering and Research Institute (ERI) in May 20XX, I have been acting as immediate department manager of Mr. Wang XXX (Paul as his English name), until his transfer to SUN’s Global Partner Engineering (GPE) team in April 20XX. My 3-year acquaintance with Paul is enough for me to know about his professional and personal qualities and thus make an authoritative comment.

Paul’s proactive attitude distinguished him and has won him major opportunities for professional growth. My management style is quite democratic – sharing with the whole team information about any potential incoming projects and it is up to the staff himself/herself to decide whether to take the project or not, which, in most cases, would require the engineer to sacrifice some of his/her spare time to prepare for the project. Paul never hesitates to take on new responsibilities. His rigorousness, earnestness and responsibility would serve as the guarantee for the high quality of the project. Within a short span of three years he worked under my direction, he has created a number of precedents in ERI – the first person to have stated the project technical framework and passed the most rigorous technical review process by the Architecture Review Committee (ARC) from SUN’s U.S. headquarters, the first employee to have created an open sourced Java project on the java.net community, to have implemented ERI’s first project that was invited to be demonstrated on the global JavaOne Conference, which then became ERI’s first project to be adopted by JDK.

As I see him, Paul’s greatest asset lies in his acute technical know-how and his rich software engineering experience. His skills in C++ permitted him to immediately assume the role of a CDE sustaining engineer with a firm structural grasp of the colossal CDE code base. With just a one-week training on Java, he became an adept engineer in the architecture analysis, design and, of course, coding to cope with the challenging PDASync Upgrade project. It was not long before Paul achieved another major success—the JDesktop Integration Components project (JDIC), which, ever since it was open sourced, has remained as the top 10 downloads in the Java.net website. Finally incorporated into JDK 6.0, JDIC now serves as a powerful utility for millions of global Java developers.

Without much exaggeration, the IT is the most rapid developing industry and, as a fast learner, Paul has the passion to keep abreast with the latest developments by taking the constant initiative to assimilate the most updated knowledge and skills. He is also adept at applying the newly-acquired knowledge and skills to enhance the efficiency and quality of his work. For instance, during the JDIC project, he self-studied Unit Test, Extreme Programming, Refactoring and other engineering methods regarding software quality and introduced them into the team’s development processes. Furthermore, he gave special coaching to his team members concerning the applications to improve on group performance. All these methods turned out to be critical for JDIC’s later great success.

In successfully executing various projects, Paul’s outstanding coordination, communication, and leadership skills played an important role. Sun Micro is a leading global corporation and it is vital for Chinese engineers to work closely with their international counterparts. Paul’s English proficiency allows him to communicate clearly and effectively with foreign co-workers at the regular teleconferences each week. In the PDASync project, apart from leading two other engineers and completing his own developing responsibilities, he played an important role in the overall project management. Whereas in the JDIC project, he was not only the team lead of Chinese engineers but also the acting program manager, communicating with the American project manager on every step of the project. Beyond that, he himself completed the development of three key modules, the most important workload for Chinese engineers. In short, Paul is not only a leader of great vision but also a contributive player.

Paul’s outstanding professional performance is well known to his colleagues and well recognized by the top management, culminating in his becoming one of the 10 ERI annual stars among a total of 400 employees, the top honor confirming the comprehensive achievement of an ERI engineer.

The mere space of a short recommendation like this can by no means do justice to all my good opinions about Paul, who truly deserves my highest evaluation! His unparalleled proactive attitude, his passion for new technique, his software engineering caliber and his working experience in globalized environment are what I see as the outstanding qualities most relevant to your program and to his future career. Just as he has excelled in his career heretofore, he is bound to excel in whatever academic and career paths that he chooses to pursue based on his sensible judgment. Therefore, he definitely enjoys my most unreserved recommendation.

Yours sincerely

Mark XXX