This project aimed to analyze the different types of work opportunities emailed out on the Pratt Institute School of Information listserv. This project consists of two parts: First exporting the Pratt School of Information listserv emails. In February 2020 the School of Information created separate listservs for each of the different degree tracks, so I needed to export two sets of emails. The first was the listserv to all students prior to February 2020 and the listserv specific to the Library Information School track. I used Google Takeout to export zipped .mbox files for each listserv. Then I created a Python script to export the following contents: “subject line” “date” “email contents” into .csv files for each listserv. Because the email contents exported a really large file including a lot of unreadable script, I initially created two .csv exports for each listserv one with just the subject lines so I was able to determine how many emails were in each listserv and the second including the email content.
The second component was writing a Python script to loop through each .csv file to find instances of work opportunities which were broken down into: “Full time”, “Part time”, “Internship”, “Volunteer”. Due to inconsistencies between emails, the script needed to loop through both the subject line column and the email content column. A second Python script was written to further analyze types of “Full time” and “Internship” opportunities, such as paid or unpaid internships, as well as if “Full time” opportunities were tenured or termed. Both scripts wrote out to new .csv files for each of the two listservs. Due to inconsistencies with the data, and issues with my script, the breakdown of “Full time” and “Internship” opportunities didn’t equal to the total amount for each opportunity category. The results were used to create graphs using Tableau Public to hopefully give an idea of the types of opportunities being sent out to students through the Pratt School of Information listservs.