Next Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will make his “first official” visit back to Harvard, the school he dropped out of in 2004 to lunch his massively successful (to put it lightly) social networking company.
The purpose of Zuck’s visit, reports the Boston Herald, is to “poach Hub engineers for his Silicon Valley social networking giant.”
“If (Zuckerberg’s) coming to Boston to recruit, it indicates how important recruiting is for Facebook and how hard it is for them to recruit talented folks by staying focused purely on Silicon Valley resources,” Adam Marcus, managing director of Boston’s OpenView Venture Partners, told the Herald. “Boston has a very deep bench when it comes to technical talent and educational institutions that produce high-quality engineering talent.”
During his Harvard return visit, Zuckerberg – accompanied by Mike Schroepfer, Facebook vice president of engineering – will meet with 200-plus computer science students at Harvard’s Farkas Hall to promote engineering jobs and internships at Facebook. Zuckerberg also will meet with Harvard president Drew Faust.
Though it’s not technically his first time back — he made an unofficial appearance in an introductory computer science class in 2005 — it is the first that Zuck has been invited back to meet with “Harvard officials.”
In addition to Harvard, Zuckerberg, 27, is also scheduled to make stops at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University on his East Coast recruiting trip.
Mark’s Harvard-return trip comes after a meeting at Standford University last weekend where the Facebook mastermind said that in hindsight he wouldn’t have left Boston for the glitz of Silicon Valley.
“If I were starting now, I would have just stayed in Boston.”
via BH