EMBRACE

Index Page
About page.
Partnership with LGBTQ organizations
Mentor stories
Mentor Story Specific
Student sign up page
Mentor sign up page
Chat page
Mentors post stories here.

Inspiration

Many people may think that LGBTQ is very far away from high school students. However, the fact is, about 8% of American high school students identify themselves as LGBTQ individuals. Although there are several LGBTQ hubs available on the internet, their general target users are grown adults, and problems like hookups are growing viral on these sites. As a large percentage of the LGBTQ community, high school students, or teenagers, are generally ignored. We saw this gap between this community’s demand and the lack of platforms, which causes unfairness and injustice, and we created a platform exactly for this community.

What it does

On this platform, LGBTQ teenagers who want help can be matched with professional, experienced mentors who are willing to offer supports and helps. All mentors at Embrace are carefully selected. They come from LGBTQ organizations across the country such as The Human Rights Campaign and The LGBT National Help Center. Here is a gallery of our mentors’ stories. After prospective mentees and mentors answered several questions, the data collected will go through a matching algorithm to find the best match of a mentee of a mentor. Once the connection is established, students and mentors can chat freely, and we will have weekly followups.

Core Functions

Login & Signup Overview: Both mentors and mentees are required to complete their profiles through signing up for an account. The sign-up process includes answering a set of specially designed diagonistic questions and common questions like username and passwords.

Tech & Framworks used:

PHP with Validation Library to confirm form submission MySql to store account information HTML, CSS, JavaScript with BootStrap framwork to build form and handle various types of inputs See Files: login.php, signup.php, signupm.php (Sign-up page for mentor)

Chatting, story submission, and user profile system Overview: After the mentor and mentee are paired by algorithm, the mentor will provide guidance for the mentee through our online platform and he/she will have access to the profile of the mentee. The mentor will also provides insights by inputing and submitting their personal stories in our website.

Tech & Framworks used:

PHP with explode() method to conduct text classfication when storing inputs from the frontend. MySql to store story and chatting data. 4 Tables in total are used to implement the function. HTML, CSS, JavaScript with BootStrap framwork to build original styles and interaction script. 80% Freshly self made. We're not like those teams out there that only crtl+v templates See Files: chatMentor.php, chatStudent.php, write.html etc.

Mentor & Mentee Matching+Supervision Algorithm Overview: One of the platform's key function is pairing individual mentee with the mentor most suitable to give him/her advice. The matching degree is based off the similarity of the mentor and mentee in certain aspects. Also,

Tech & Framworks used:

PHP to build self-design algorithm that optimizes the pairing to minimize the cost function of absolute value differences. Future plan: Use hate speech detection machine learning model to automatically supervise mentor behaviors after the volume of mentor&mentee pairs increased. Ideal Data pipeline: Mentor's comments for mentee --> Text cleaning --> GloVe vectorization --> Model Selection See Files: Signup.php (The algorithm is implemented during the course of signing up)