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Grad Agent

Finds and evaluates graduate faculty, drafts outreach, tracks applications, and prepares SOPs with human review.

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Install Grad Agent

Pick your client, then add it in one click or paste the config.

STDIOPython
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "grad-agent": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "grad-agent"
      ],
      "env": {
        "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY": "YOUR_VALUE_HERE"
      }
    }
  }
}

Settings → Developer → Edit Config, merge this into mcpServers, then fully quit and reopen Claude Desktop.

Values are written into the snippet above so you can paste it as is. They never leave your browser.

Install not yet sandbox-tested— we haven't run this command through our automated sandbox yet. Not a red flag; we're working through the catalog.

Overview

The grad-agent MCP server helps applicants discover faculty, draft verified outreach, and track fully funded MS and PhD applications. It runs as a stdio MCP server or CLI, using configured profile data, Semantic Scholar, lab pages, email accounts, and project sources. Use it when you need repeatable faculty matching, application tracking, follow-up drafting, or interview preparation without sending messages automatically. Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Zed, and Windsurf can launch it through the same MCP command configuration.

Use cases

  • Discover faculty by research area or program deadline
  • Draft and verify personalized professor outreach
  • Track graduate applications, scholarships, and recommendation requests
  • Prepare interview notes after professor replies
  • Compile versioned school-specific SOP PDFs

Key features

  • Semantic Scholar identity anchoring
  • Faculty, region, and research-fit filtering
  • Fact-checked cold-email drafting
  • IMAP reply detection and follow-up drafting
  • Application and scholarship tracking
  • LaTeX SOP and interview-prep generation

Security & health

What it can reach and how reliably it runs — from our own checks, not the maintainer’s claims.

ActiveLast checked Today

Recent health check succeeded.

4/4 checks healthy over the last 40d

Supply-chain signal

No high-severity advisories surfaced by our automated scan.

Critical 0High 0Medium 0Low 0

Scanned 13d ago via OSV.dev · grad-agent (PyPI)

Adoption & maintenance

Factual signals from GitHub, npm, and our automated checks — not a rating.

GitHub stars4Stargazers on the source repository.
Last commit27d agoMost recent push to the default branch.

How Grad Agent works

What grad-agent MCP server does

The grad-agent MCP server supports graduate-school outreach and application tracking for applicants targeting fully funded MS or PhD programs. It can discover professors through arXiv research areas or program deadlines, resolve identities through Semantic Scholar author IDs, and reject ambiguous matches instead of relying on name strings alone. Faculty checks include h-index and publication-count gates, while region filtering can use profile settings, keyword data, homepage domains, and an LLM fallback.

For selected faculty, it examines lab pages for recruitment signals and contact details, then compares their research with the applicant’s projects using tags, TF-IDF similarity, and learned response outcomes. Cold-email drafts reference recent papers, receive a fit score from 1 to 10, and undergo a second verification pass against paper abstracts. Drafts can include warnings for stale publication activity or disagreements between Semantic Scholar affiliation data and a live homepage.

The system also detects replies through read-only IMAP, prepares follow-up drafts for contacts silent for at least 10 days, and creates interview preparation documents after replies. It compiles school-specific SOPs to versioned LaTeX PDFs and tracks outreach, recommendation-letter requests, deadlines, and external scholarships in YAML or XLSX files.

How it works

The grad-agent MCP server reads configuration from ~/.grad-agent, including the applicant profile, target programs, scholarships, and secrets. Profile changes apply while a long-running MCP session remains open. A project synchronization command can scan GitHub, Hugging Face, and local projects before a batch run produces drafts for review.

Daily execution can be scheduled with launchd, a systemd user timer, or Windows Task Scheduler. Bundled Claude skills cover SOP writing and recommendation-letter writing, and the package also includes a cold-email drafter.

Setup and configuration

Install with uvx grad-agent server, pipx install grad-agent, or a virtual-environment installation. Run grad-agent init to create the profile, program, scholarship, and environment files. Configure the Anthropic key, SMTP credentials, and the applicant’s identity, documents, degree status, target term, degree, regions, research areas, and seed projects. Semantic Scholar, IMAP, GitHub, and Hugging Face settings are available for their respective features.

Claude Code and Claude Desktop can launch the server with grad-agent server or uvx grad-agent server. Cursor, Zed, and Windsurf use the same stdio manifest pattern. The package documentation also provides a command for installing its Claude skills and an optional letterhead configuration for recommendation-letter PDFs.

Tools and capabilities

  • Discover and batch-process potential faculty leads.
  • Verify identities and record skipped ambiguous matches.
  • Filter by region, faculty indicators, recruitment signals, and research fit.
  • Draft, fact-check, score, and email outreach for review.
  • Detect replies and prepare one-time follow-up nudges.
  • Generate interview preparation sheets and versioned SOP PDFs.
  • Track programs, scholarships, outreach, and recommendation requests.

Limitations and notes

The server depends on correctly completed profile and environment files. Identity resolution can skip candidates when comparable Semantic Scholar matches cannot be distinguished. IMAP reply detection is read-only, and outreach remains a review workflow rather than automatic professor delivery. API rate limits and the quality of public faculty pages or paper abstracts affect discovery and verification results.

Read the full README View source on GitHub

Reviews

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Frequently Asked Questions about Grad Agent

grad-agent is an MCP server that connects Claude-compatible MCP clients to graduate-application workflows, Semantic Scholar, arXiv-related discovery, faculty webpages, email accounts, GitHub, Hugging Face, and local project data. Its main tools discover and score faculty, draft verified cold emails, track applications, detect replies, generate SOPs, and prepare interviews.

Install it with `uvx grad-agent server`, `pipx install grad-agent`, or a Python virtual environment. Run `grad-agent init` afterward to create the profile, program, scholarship, and environment files, then configure the required account details and application settings.

Yes, grad-agent works with Cursor through the standard stdio MCP manifest. Point the client at `uvx grad-agent server`, using the same command structure documented for Claude Desktop, and complete `grad-agent init` before using application workflows.

No, grad-agent does not send messages directly to professors. It uses SMTP to email drafts to the applicant’s inbox for review, while IMAP is used for read-only reply detection and follow-up tracking.

grad-agent anchors a candidate to the canonical Semantic Scholar author ID associated with a trigger paper rather than matching only a name. When comparable identities cannot be separated, it refuses to draft and records the candidate in a skipped sheet with the mismatch reason.

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