DEItectives

Because Diversity Shouldn’t be Hard to Find

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Inspiration

As Texas residents and students of the University of Houston, the passing of SB 17 has greatly impacted our campus culture. In August of this year, UH disbanded the entirety of its DEI office and programs as SB17 allows the state of Texas to pursue legal action against any public Texas university/college with a DEI program after January 1, 2024. No longer do students from historically marginalized backgrounds have the resources that previously made pursuing a higher education a realistic possibility. DEI programs have been proven to reduce rates of suicide, racism, and hate crimes all while preparing students to work in a culturally diverse workforce.

However, not all hope is lost! Texas legislature only has control over Texas public schools, and private schools are under federal jurisdiction. Through this, private universities like Rice have decided to expand their DEI services to external students. While this doesn’t resolve the issue of DEI programs being removed from public campuses, increasing awareness and accessibility to programs that are still here is critical to achieving equity in education.

What it does

DEItectives is a web app that matches users with the closest five campuses with DEI programs available to outside students. Through this search, the app also recommends three of the closest diversity-focused corporate events to aid those who seek to join a company where diversity is held at the forefront of their vision. This site is intended to be used by both prospective and current college students. As October/November is college application season, this website aids in shortening the college search for those who prioritize diversity and its protection within their education.

However, we also acknowledge not all students have the financial capabilities or means of transportation to transfer to or physically meet with these DEI offices in person. So to accommodate for this, we have provided a series of resources at the very bottom of the web app that anyone can access online at no cost.

How we built it

Figma was used primarily for the design of our web app, and external tools like Unsplash and Procreate were leveraged for background images and logo creation respectively. We used React to build the front end of our web app and Node.js for the backend. Flask was used to create the backend API that stores the DEI program information for all private colleges within Texas. Lastly, we integrated a Google Maps API into our web app to determine the distance of a user to nearby private colleges using longitude & latitude coordinates that then provide users with ranked results based on geographical distance.

Challenges we ran into

We originally intended to host our web app using an external server; however, we fell into CORS header issues as we were trying to host using Google Apps Script. We swapped to hosting locally and focused our attention on perfecting front-end development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although it provided us with a bit of trouble throughout the first half of the hackathon, we’re really happy we got the Google Maps API to start working using a local host rather than our intended plan to use it off an external server. On a more personal note, we’re also extremely proud of ourselves for our productivity and efficiency when working within a group where no one had worked with each other prior.

What we learned

We learned how to effectively translate a web app design made on Figma into a fully formed front-end design. Along the same line, we learned effective time allocation regarding front-end development and succeeded in accomplishing our goals despite the time restraint.

What's next for DEItectives

While we have an existing open-source database of all private colleges/universities in Texas from the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES), we have yet to add all of the DEI program information for each university. Thus, moving forward, expanding the database would be a primary concern of ours as more universities cover a larger geographical area, and in turn, aid in helping more throughout Texas access these essential DEI programs.

Furthermore, the recommended events portion of the web app was created with the intended purpose of partnering with businesses that wish to further publicize the diversity-focused events they’re hosting. This allows for these programs to reach a larger audience than before, and most importantly, increase attendance as those accessing this web app would already be inclined towards attending an event focused on values such as diversity and inclusion.

Overall, in the future, DEItectives seeks to expand the database of DEI programs currently accessible to users and increase partnerships with businesses that value diversity, inclusion, and equity.

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