Project Overview

For the average high school student, getting one or two college emails a week can be a rather insightful experience (perhaps even something to look forward to). How about one or two a day? Still not too bad, right? But for the overwhelming majority of high school students in the United States, most of whom have unknowingly signed away their email inbox freedom on their last PSAT, SAT, or AP exam by enrolling in College Board's Student Search Service, things start getting out of hand. What used to be one or two college emails a day or week has become one or two college emails an hour, most of which are advertisements that read no better than typical spam mail.

And that's how the college email de-spamifier was born. As members of the inaugural cohort of AI Camp's Talent Incubator internship program, we set out to build a Gmail Add-On that automatically filters college emails based on a user's specified preferences (e.g., tuition, location, acceptance rate, etc.). That way, high school students (including ourselves at the time) would be able to readily extract emails from the colleges we actually cared about, rather than having to filter through hundreds of random college spam emails. Over the course of thirteen weeks, we built a working MVP of the college email de-spamifier using a Beautiful Soup web scraper, a Django backend, a Google Apps Script frontend, and a SQLite database. For more details about the process of building the college email de-spamifier and the AI Camp internship experience as a whole, please check out the Medium article I wrote at the conclusion of the internship.