CoTAI / Gems Collection / AI4HighSchool at LHP

Request for a Letter of Recommendation

1. Build a profile
   • Compose a curriculum vitae (CV), preferably using Overleaf.com CV templates. You can send request to Mr. Hung Ngo for his students’ CV template as a reference.
   • Participate in diverse training & research activities and keep updating your CV. For example, become a teaching assistant (TA) of CoTAI’s AI4HighSchool program at Le-Hong-Phong Highschool for the Gifted.
2. Build a portfolio of academic activities
   • Create a personal webpage in HackMD/Notion/GitHub. GitHub.io page is highly recommended since it looks more professional.
   • Put your CV there as a profile subpage. Include in your CV the url to your personal webpage.
   • Write blogposts, make tutorials, summarize AI4HighSchool courses, each as a subpage.
   • Participate in competitions (scientific research, startup, ISEF, study groups, etc.)
   • Document your AI projects (descriptions, slides, video, demo, app, sourcecode repo, etc.) as subpages. See a STEAM-Hack project and other capstone projects for reference.
   • ⭐ for everything (CV, homepage, etc) a good presentation hint is to put most recent events first.
3. Request a LoR
   • Send your referee/supervisor (Mr. Hung Ngo) information about the univesity, department/major, the lab/prof, and scholarship programs you are applying for.
   • Include URLs to your CV and your personal homepage.
   • Set a timeline (should be no less than 1 week for your referee to get things done)
   • Keep your instructor/supervisor updated on the revisions of your application documents per suggestions.
4. Apply & fly!
   • Make sure you inform your instructor about your application results.
   • Pay it forward: spread the news, share your experience, help junior members.

Sample LoR for a LHP student

Dear Admission Committee,

I am a senior researcher in the fields of AI, Machine Learning & Robotics at CoTAI – Center of Talent in AI. I have been directly working with young talents in our highly selective research training programs (https://gem.cot.ai), in which ABC has been a member for more than 2 years now. It is thus my great pleasure to write this letter to recommend ABC for admission with scholarship to your undergraduate Computer Science program.

ABC has demonstrated strong academic and research skills with solid foundations in AI math, programming, and deployment during our semester-long Machine Learning and Deep Learning (ML/DL) courses at Le Hong Phong HighSchool for the Gifted (HCMC, Vietnam). For your convenience, below I attach a diagram summarizing the advanced topics covered in our AI talent training courses.

ABC is very keen on applying AI/ML to build innovative and creative applications, as demonstrated through her AI projects with CoTAI. I was intrigued with her use of Fine-Grained Image Classification model during her final project presentation for our ML4AI course. This allows her model to have a great generalization ability on the Oxford-102-flowers dataset: The flower classifier still gives highly accurate predictions even when the input is a picture of an entire tree with flowers, instead of an isolated flower as in the training set.

I am equally impressed with her dedication and commitment while serving as a volunteer Teaching Assistant in CoTAI’s PythonAI course. She is the most proactive TA in making great connections with students in the class, not only enthusiastically responding to their questions during lectures but also providing in-person tutoring sessions beyond class time. As a result, she managed to help a female student from almost dropping out to achieving a satisfactory score during the midterm exam. I am also impressed by her ability to convey and articulate coding problems to the students. She is an important factor to our teaching staff as she offers insights from a student perspective, prompting the main instructor of the common mistakes made by students and how an explanation is the easiest for students to understand.

Despite diverse and challenging training activities, ABC has still managed to achieve first rank in her class specialized in Physics. For such impressive demonstrations of research interests and capability, she has been admitted to CoTAI’s student research group Deep Symbolic AI, focusing on Physics-informed neural networks. This aims to equip young talents with solid foundations in promising AI topics and areas, allowing them to be well-prepared and research-ready for future development.

I strongly believe ABC has all the necessary cognitive, technical, organizational, and interpersonal skills and abilities to be successful and influential during your undergraduate program. Should you need any further information, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely yours,