Moriel Schottlender

As a software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, the open source organization that brought the world Wikipedia, Moriel Schottlender (M.S. ’14, Computer Science) has plenty of room to test herself. She began working at Wikimedia after applying to Google Summer of Code. Even as an intern, she developed code that impacted the user's experience. “The magic of open source is that it's very welcoming. If I was an intern anywhere else, I might not have been given the opportunity to touch live code,” she says. Growing up in Israel, Schottlender quickly realized that the left-to-right conventions of the web were at odds with her right-to-left world view. “When you're reading right to left, your mental model shifts. What you're expecting to see on screen is different.” At NYIT, she found that worldview could be a competitive advantage. “It's easy to see what is wrong with a program when you read it from right to left,” explains Schottlender. She is putting that perspective to good use as she works on a tool that improves collaborative editing on Wikipedia. Going forward, she hopes to do even more by adapting the conventions of the web for non-native English speakers.