To simplify the process of finding Ph.D. opportunities, I created Fenjan - a bot that automatically searches for relevant positions. The initial version scanned LinkedIn and Twitter for Ph.D. openings and delivered them to my inbox each morning.
As friends expressed interest in using it, I expanded Fenjan to support multiple users with different research interests. The bot now sends tailored emails containing Ph.D. positions from the past 24 hours, with improved formatting for better readability.
The project has grown to include university website scanning, with Fenjan currently monitoring 17 universities for open positions, making the job search process more efficient.
I used Python Twitter API and Selenium for searching Twitter and LinkedIn. All the codes for scraping universities’ websites are written in Golang, and I save the search results in the SQLite database.
Fenjan also has a Mastodon bot that re-posts Ph.D. positions from Twitter to Sigmoid social. You can find it at https://sigmoid.social/@fenjan. Its Mastodon bot has a few more features than the email bot. It downloads tweet images if available and posts them along with the tweet text. It also converts Twitter short links to their non-short format, as link shortening isn’t encouraged in Mastodon.
The code for the Fenjan project is available in this GitHub repository: https://github.com/mh-salari/fenjan