FACEBOOK'S ZUCKERBERG TO VISIT OLD STOMPING GROUNDS AT HARVARD

Mark Zuckerberg is going back to Harvard for the first time since he dropped out of the prestigious university to found Facebook, according to a report from The Harvard Crimson.

The student newspaper says the T-shirt- and hoodie-wearing Zuckerberg will visit Harvard on Monday afternoon to recruit students for internships at Facebook. It'll be the first time he's visited the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus in an official capacity since 2004 when he moved to California, the paper says.

Facebook's CEO also is reportedly recruiting for internships at other East Coast universities, including Carnegie Mellon and MIT.

Students, not surprisingly, are thrilled about the visit.

If you've seen the movie 'Social Network,' you know that when Zuckerberg attended a talk by Bill Gates it was a pivotal moment,'' Harvard senior Michael Wong told The Boston Globe. "This could be another iteration of that. The next Mark Zuckerberg could be in the audience.''

Students from Harvard applied for the Facebook internships within seconds of them being posted online, a university official told the Crimson.

Harvard, for its part, is happy to welcome back the billionaire drop-out.

"We're very happy to have him here. We've rolled out the red carpet," said Tania deLuzuriaga, a spokeswoman for the university. "The excitement on campus is palpable. There is a big waiting list of students who want to go to this event and can't get in. It's the talk of campus today."

Zuckerberg will hold a press conference at 4:30 p.m. before meeting with students at 5 p.m., she said.

The second meeting serves Facebook's purpose of looking for new engineers. The site, which is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, already has more than 2,000 employees.

Zuckerberg "is eager to connect with computer science and engineering students from some of the best schools in the world, and may well be tomorrow's Facebook innovators," Facebook's Andrew Noyes told the Crimson in an e-mail.

Facebook has grown from a dorm-room project to an international sensation, with more than 800 million people using the social-networking site.

Zuckerberg's fame has risen in tandem with the site's success. Last year, the Oscar-winning movie "The Social Network" profiled the somewhat socially awkward king of social media. At a Facebook product release in September, "Saturday Night Live's" Andy Samberg did impressions of Facebook's founder onstage.

Zuckerberg also is scheduled to give an interview Monday with PBS' Charlie Rose.CNN