What about an idea - Internship
This is going to be another ramble, like the others so. As the beginning of the semester starts, it appears as if I need to apply to internships, and with that comes an idea. I was thinking I needed a way to manage where I apply, what respond I get, whether it was a phone interview, a in-person interview, or no reply at all. I'd love to be able to track if someone I know suggested I applied there, or just found it online. And so, I went off to create a spreadsheet. But wouldn't it be sick if it be automated. What if the spreadsheet could read your email and decipher if you got a response or not. That would be sick, at least that sounds amazing to me. And then I got to thinking, what if I make a web app that stores this data? Sure there are websites like Indeed that might track where apply, but it's more to search for places to apply than actually track. I can't be the only person who has thought of this idea. So I did some more searching.
Teal
Teal
Teal seemed like a interesting option (it's free, mostly) already out there, but it seems to have a lot of other features that I don't necessarily need. I think one their big draws of this app is the resume builder. They seem to spend a lot of focus on it, however this isn't really what I want in my app. I use Reactive Resume to help build my resumes I use, and it works just the way I want it to. I can't say Teal is bad, there are a lot of cool features I'd love to learn to make. The table view of all the application spots is similar to what I was thinking when creating the app. And when you go to edit the details on the application, the way you move the application to the next stages is super interesting.
You click on the stage you are at, it changes the view slightly, and gives a check list of items you should be working on. It also gives tips on how to do it successfully. What draws my attention is the Chrome Extension that allows you to quickly draw info on the application such the job description and dates. With it knowing the job description, it pulls out words that are repeated so you can edit your resume to best fit the position. I do however find the site a little confusing, having things placed everywhere. It seems to doing too many things, with new features being added over refinement of the old ones. It does a lot of cool things, but I think I could make something that I want more.
Notion
The template I found and played around with
The next tracker I looked at was a notion board, I don't have quite as much to say about this. It's a board, that looks pretty, isn't super complicated, but doesn't automate anything. There's no Google Chrome extension but there's also no annoying extra's. It's just a board, with only the information you need. I j
What I want
You may be here to here me rant about two applications that could of definitely worked, or you may be here to hear what I really wanted when I first came up with the idea. What I truly want from this is a automated system that reads my email automatically logs the job application as accept, interview, or denied/no-response. Just going to think through what I would need from a system like this. First and foremost, for the most basic of if I get a denied message. You could probably just know the email that you got the confirmation message from and look for any email from that address, and read what the contents of it says. That is where it gets difficult though. The emails generally don't straight up say "denied", but more so of a we're moving on with other people, however I think you could probably figure out it is denied. The next problem is detecting if you got a interview or not. These emails are not always (almost never) coming from the same email that sent the confirmation email so it makes it a little more tricky. It is more likely the email will come from a email with the same domain so you could possibly track any email from that domain, however I'm not certain this is a perfect solution. Another idea I had thought about is running the emails through AI to determine who it is coming from and what the outcome of the email is. This is also still not a perfect solution as AI is not perfect (this is also much more difficult). So all in all, I think I'm going to stick with just a classic Google Sheet, however make it look more pretty like the the Notion board. I'll update this if I get around to making a website. So long for now.
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