How to get a summer internship for an Ivy League professor if you’re in high school/college:
People have been asking me how I did this and since I’m no longer a college counselor here’s the sauce for free:
1. Scrape every professor at the top 5 colleges near you in the field you want to study. Get their first name, last name, subject, class name/number, and past work. Store that in a spreadsheet.
2. Have Claude 4.1 Opus generate a template that captures those variables in a way that would fit for each professor. Store that in your Gmail drafts with {{ VARIABLE_NAME }} for each variable, including custom text that glazes each professor and tells them how badly you want to work for them and their work specifically.
3. Use Claude Haiku 4.5’s API to populate the variable names for each professor based on the variables that you scraped. Again, store in the spreadsheet with the columns matching the VARIABLE_NAMEs.
4. Use Yet Another Mail Merge (or any Mail Merge) software to cross the spreadsheet with your email draft and send out 1000 emails in 5 minutes.
It’s that easy. Share with your younger siblings.
I ran this method when I was a college counselor. Mass email outbound to professors at universities to secure summer internships.
My students would email 300 professors with 'personalized' messages like this, even though it was just a template with text replacement. Got them summer programs at Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, etc.
Not saying this person did that... but the method is still unpatched.