Lyndsey Scott

Lyndsey Scott is an American model and iOS mobile app software developer. She was the first African American to sign an exclusive runway contract with Calvin Klein, and has worked for Gucci, Prada, and Victoria's Secret.

Besides modeling, Scott writes mobile apps for iOS devices, and mentors young women in computer programming. She has been credited for challenging the stereotypes about models and computer programmers. Her father founded a home healthcare company after having been a programmer for the National Security Agency. She practiced martial arts beginning at age nine, and earned a black belt in Taekwondo.

Scott was bullied as a teenager. She reported she was the only Black person for three years at Newark Academy, the New Jersey preparatory high school she attended, and so thin – and – that she was called a "monster". She states peers would invite then uninvite her from parties, and tell her she couldn't sit with them in the dining room. "It got so bad in high school I couldn't even look people in the face. I would hide out in school so I wouldn't have to eat lunch in the cafeteria or see people in between classes."

Modeling

After college, Scott was more interested in acting than computer science, and began pursuing auditions in New York City. Her body had changed in college, partly due to taking weight-gain supplements, and she says she "started looking more like a model". Elle Girl featured her in a video including her Click new model training. At the time, she was 24, which was considered old for a model. The agency asked her to lie about her age,

Even with an agency contract, Scott wasn't immediately successful. In early 2009 Scott's work was handing out flyers on a street corner when she got a call from fashion house Calvin Klein. Bethann Hardison said that no model in recent history had made such an impact. In the 2010 fall NYFW, she was the only black model walking runways for Prada. She also changed agencies to Elite Model Management, which was more accepting of her actual age. Publications credited her with disproving the stereotypes that fashion models had no brains. Fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar asked her to report on the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.

Computer programming Scott started programming at the age of 12, by writing games for her TI-89 graphing calculator and sharing them with friends in middle school. She learned Java and C++ programming languages and MIPS architecture at Amherst College, and taught herself skills she used for writing applications in Python and Objective C on the iOS platform.

Scott has dedicated herself to educating young women on how to program. She maintains a profile on Stack Overflow, a website where users gain reputation for providing answers about computer programming. In early 2014, she was one of the top 2% of users with over 2.000 reputation points and more than 38.000 profile views. As of February 2022, she has over 36,000 reputation points with over 400 answers to user questions and is in the top 1% of users on the platform.

She was a representative for Code.org's second Hour of Code learning initiative, made a video teaching programming with Disney's Frozen characters, and is a mentor at Girls Who Code, an organization teaching programming to teenage girls. She has given talks on programming at schools in Harlem and NYU, and mentored Girl Scouts in programming in Los Angeles.

Her combination of modeling and coding is seen as inspirational to young women. She was a keynote speaker for the Harvard Undergraduate Women in Business in 2014, and a presenter for the Ford Freedom Awards in 2015.

Applications Scott's earliest iOS mobile apps were written on her own, for Standable, Inc., the company she founded in 2011. Her second was iPort, intended to help models organize their career portfolio digitally.

Lyndsey currently works as the lead iOS software engineer at NGO fundraiser Rallybound, where she builds iOS fundraising apps for various non-profit organizations.

In 2022, she announced the launch of the Lynsey Scott Coding+ Scholarship, which is geared towards LGBTQIA+, women, and/or BIPOC students who are majoring in computer science.

Personal life In 2016, Scott was sued by a man who leased her Roosevelt Island apartment through Airbnb, who claimed the apartment was dilapidated and the area unsafe; Scott said the posted photos, descriptions and reviews were verifiable and accurate. The case was dismissed.