Harvard — 推荐信（3 封）

To the Admissions Committee, It is my distinct pleasure to recommend Li Ming for admission to Harvard College. I have served as Li Ming's college counselor for the past three years, during which time I have guided approximately 200 students through the college application process. Among them, Li Ming stands out as one of the two or three most extraordinary young people I have encountered in my 14-year career. Three qualities distinguish him. First, intellectual generosity: Li Ming has consistently invested his own competitive success in others. After winning a gold medal at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad—an achievement that places him in the top 0.1% of Chinese high-schoolers—he returned to teach Python at a rural middle school in Yunnan for the second consecutive summer. Few students of his caliber prioritize this kind of reciprocal learning. Second, leadership without ego: he founded his school's first AI club, which has grown to 30 active members and produced four USACO gold medalists. When I asked him what the club meant to him, he did not mention his own role. He spoke about a member who had "found her voice" through the reading group. Third, calm under pressure: during the IMO selection camp—a notoriously stressful process—Li Ming was the teammate others turned to for perspective. He brought a chess set, taught anyone who wanted to learn, and quietly became the social anchor of the squad. I have no hesitation in placing Li Ming in the top 1% of students I have ever counseled. Harvard would be both a privilege for him and a gift to your community. Sincerely, Wang Li College Counselor

To the Admissions Committee, I have taught Li Ming in two courses—AP Computer Science A and an advanced algorithms elective—and have advised him as founder of the school's AI club. He is the strongest CS student I have taught in nine years, and the one whose growth has surprised me the most. In AP CS, Li Ming turned in a final project—a Markov-chain text generator trained on Tang dynasty poetry—that was three semesters beyond the syllabus. What struck me was not the technical ambition but the questions he brought to me: "Is it fair to train a model on a poet who has been dead for 1,200 years and cannot consent?" and "How do we attribute the output?" These are questions I have heard from graduate students, not from 16-year-olds. The most vivid memory I have of him is from our school's first 24-hour Hackathon. At 3 a.m. his team was stuck on a bug. While the others slept, Li Ming stayed up to trace the problem. When I asked him the next morning whether he had slept, he said, "I did—but only after I understood the bug." I have used that line in class ever since. Li Ming will not be the most flashy student at Harvard. He will be the one whose roommate, three years from now, says "he changed the way I think about engineering." Sincerely, Chen Hao AP Computer Science A Teacher

To the Admissions Committee, I have mentored Li Ming for 18 months as the external advisor to his school's AI club. I have supervised approximately 30 high-school research interns in my career; Li Ming is the only one whose work has been incorporated into a manuscript we plan to submit. Our project is on fairness in low-resource NLP for Chinese dialects. Li Ming independently designed the evaluation protocol, recruited 12 student volunteers to collect dialect speech data, and identified a critical flaw in our initial baseline (a data augmentation step that was actually amplifying the bias it was meant to remove). The flaw was subtle enough that two graduate students on the project had missed it. What separates Li Ming from his high-achieving peers is a particular quality of attention. He does not skim. When reading a paper he pulls the references, checks the math, and re-implements the algorithm in a notebook before discussing it. This is graduate-level epistemic discipline. I will be applying to faculty positions this year. If Li Ming were my PhD student in five years, I would consider myself fortunate. Sincerely, Liu Yang, PhD Postdoctoral Researcher, Tsinghua University