JoinALab

A personalized research and internship matching engine for university students. JoinALab collects opportunities — faculty directories and campus research programs at 115 universities, NSF REU sites, internship lists, and more (142,861 records in the 2026-10-08 refresh) — then ranks and explains each match against your profile.

Not a job board. A decision engine that answers three questions:

1. Can I apply? (Eligibility)
2. Should I apply? (Readiness)
3. What should I do next? (Actionable guidance)

Matching is field-aware: your stated research interests lead the ranking, while your major and college steer it — so a veterinary student and a CS student searching the same words see different, field-appropriate labs.

Built for the students each campus serves worst — including international students, who often can't tell what's realistic, what requires citizenship, or where to even start. It launched at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and now covers 115 universities; src/school_scope.py records the schools it has dropped and why.

Live | API

Scope, to-do list and docs

• What ships. Several built features (compare, fellowships, the roadmap, Ask AI, payments) are switched off in the public release. docs/product_scope.md lists every release flag, its state, and why each closed one is closed.
• The to-do list. Open work lives in the owner's MVP checklist. Items are numbered from M01, and batch PR titles cite those numbers. docs/roadmap.md, docs/PROJECT_PLAN.md, docs/MASTER_PLAN.md and docs/future_features.md are earlier plans, kept for history.
• Operations. RUNBOOK.md covers the scheduled jobs, the weekly refresh rotation, migrations (including how to name a new one) and environment setup. docs/RELEASE.md covers releases and rollback. docs/collector_sop.md is the procedure for adding a school.

Screenshots

Captured 2026-06-26. The navigation in them still shows Fellowships and Roadmap, which the current release hides.

Profile Builder

Two-column form with college/major cascading dropdowns, a multi-domain skill picker (add your own), clickable research-interest suggestions, international-student filtering, resume upload with auto-skill extraction, and a research interest/experience balance slider.

Ranked Results

Every opportunity is scored (Eligibility 0.45 + Readiness 0.35 + Upside 0.20) and bucketed into High Priority, Good Match, or Reach. Your major and college steer the ranking while your stated interests lead it, and the header surfaces how many opportunities truly match your field. Each card explains why it fits and what gaps you have.

Cold Email Generator

One-click draft with a pre-filled subject line and body, personalized to your profile and the specific opportunity. Copy to clipboard or open directly in your email client.

Dashboard

Your saved count, upcoming deadlines, pending reminders and application tracker on one page, plus how long ago the opportunity data was refreshed. (The screenshot predates this layout: it still shows corpus-wide counts.)

Why This Exists

Every campus scatters opportunities across a dozen disconnected platforms with no unified, eligibility-aware view. The launch campus (UIUC) is a representative example of the fragmentation JoinALab unifies:

Source	What it has	Problem	Our solution
Research blogs / RSS	Faculty-posted research positions	Feeds exist but nobody parses them	✅ Auto-parsed
Summer research databases	Hundreds of external programs	Pages of unfiltered listings	✅ Scraped + normalized
Handshake	Jobs + some research	Login-gated, mixes everything together	Cookie-auth collector exists; not in the scheduled refresh
Department / faculty pages	Lab-specific openings	Scattered across 50+ sites per school	✅ Faculty directories, multi-school
External REUs	500+ NSF-funded programs	Requires knowing where to look	✅ Pulled from the NSF Awards API
Research parks / internships	Hundreds of positions per year	Separate sites, not linked to research	✅ Scraped

International students have it worst: they can't tell what's realistic, what requires citizenship, or where to even start. JoinALab makes eligibility a first-class signal, not an afterthought.

Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Frontend	Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS
Backend	FastAPI, Python 3.11, Pydantic v2
Database	Supabase (profiles, favorites, interactions, saved searches, attachments, version history)
Data Collection	BeautifulSoup, feedparser, requests, NSF Awards API
Matching	Field-aware three-layer scoring (eligibility × readiness × upside) — interests lead, major/college steer — + TF-IDF semantic similarity
LLM	OpenAI, Gemini or OpenRouter (backend/lib/llm.py) for cold-email drafting and résumé tailoring
Deploy	Vercel (frontend) + Render (backend), GitHub Actions (daily data refresh that re-scrapes each school once a week, reminders, saved-search digests, ops scan)

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗