n8n AI Professor Matchmaker: OpenAI + Firecrawl + Gmail

Match student research goals to the right university professors—automatically

n8n AI Professor Matchmaker: OpenAI + Firecrawl + Gmail takes a student’s target field and CV/motivation letters, then scrapes a university faculty directory, evaluates each professor’s research fit with OpenAI, and delivers ranked matches to Google Sheets—plus an unsent Gmail draft containing a CSV of the top recommendations.

What this workflow does

• Receives a new request from an n8n Form Trigger including: a faculty/department URL, target field, degree level, Google Drive links to a CV and motivation letter, and an email address.
• Downloads both PDFs from Google Drive, extracts their text, and uses OpenAI to build a structured student research profile and field-alignment decision.
• If documents don’t align with the selected target field, the workflow stops with a review status.
• Scrapes the provided faculty directory page via the Firecrawl API and uses OpenAI to extract a list of relevant professor candidates and their official profile URLs.
• Normalizes and deduplicates candidate URLs, fetches each professor profile, and skips profiles that fail to load or contain no usable content.
• Uses OpenAI to score each professor’s research fit, computes an overall score and recommendation, ranks candidates, and keeps the top six.
• Appends results to Google Sheets, generates a per-request CSV of top matches, and creates an unsent Gmail draft addressed to the requester with the CSV attached.

Use cases

• Graduate admissions support: quickly identify faculty aligned to a student’s research interests.
• Advising teams: shortlist professors from a department directory before outreach.
• SaaS operators: automate application-style “fit matching” workflows powered by LLM analysis and web scraping.

Technical details

• Core integrations/steps: OpenAI, Firecrawl, Gmail (draft creation), and Google Drive (PDF download).
• Workflow logic nodes referenced: if, set, code, merge, and supporting nodes like sticky note.