Buenos Aires, Argentina Aug 8th, 2012 To whom it might concern, I am writing this letter to give professional, academic

and personal reference on behalf of Santiago Bragagnolo to back up his application to an open position at Ecole des Mines. I met Santiago in 2008 during my years at the Universidad Tecnolgica Nacional, Buenos Aires. The signature was Advanced Programming Techniques, a third-year optative course in which I was a graduated teaching assistant. He quickly stood out for having both a very receptive and critical mind combined with a humble attitude that allowed him to engage in a set of very positive academic conversations with the teaching group and his fellow classmates. Over the semester he proved to be an excellent student, as the matter of fact, he outperformed any other by achieving a perfect score in his final exams. As a result of his performance we invited him to join us as an undergraduate teaching assistant for the subject, role that proved to suit him perfectly. Swiftly he matched his exceptional technical skills with very good communicational ones, developing himself into a very capable instructor. As I write this I feel that is my duty to point out how proud and honored I feel about counting him among my students, and even though he didn't manage to complete his bachelor studies due personal matters I consider him to be an excellent and very capable professional, this being a reason why we took him in for an engineer position in our company when we had the chance. He has been working with us for about ten months now and we are deeply sorry to see him go. Since the very first moment his performance as exceeded our expectations. He was never afraid of challenges, and he worked hard not only to achieve the goals that were set for him but also ease the way for future developments. He participated actively in all the steps of our process, helping us to identify business needs, estimating the changes that needed to be done and delivering the final solutions all the way up to the end users. His positive attitude towards the job has been a very important asset for our company, he is a wonderful teammate and he will be surely missed. Even though he lacks of a formal certification / title he is more than suitable for performing any kind of job in the research and development areas, having enough tools and experience to being able to match the skills of a CS bachelor. I personally know that a chance of working at Ecole des Mines would be very rewarding for him and I am sure that he will be a very valuable candidate for you, so I encourage you to taking him aboard. Don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or concerns

Claudio Ezequiel Fernandez Information Systems Engineer CTO - Fanwards LLC claudio.fernandez@fanwards.com +54 911 31312623