While Mark Zuckerberg did not finish college, he recently returned to the classroom in an attempt to inspire high school students to enter into technology.
During the surprise visit at Sequoia High School, Zuckerberg talked about how students should study technology in some way in order to ensure job security.
"The simplest answer is that that's where all the jobs are going to be in the future," said Zuckerberg during his talk. "So if you look at the economy, it's easy to get the sense that the world somehow is going to be same as it is now when you grow up, that the jobs that you will have will be the same types of things that your parents have, and that's really not true if you look at the history. The world evolves, and jobs evolve."
Mark Zuckerberg followed Facebook CIO Tim Campos onstage, who also had some inspirational words for his audience, saying that they could be the next generation of Facebook leaders.
Campos also announced that the company would fund a mobile app development class at the high school, teaching students fundamentals on how to develop apps.
Following his speech, students had a number of interesting questions for Campos, including "what happened to MySpace?" Campos' response to this was that people moved to Facebook because that's where their friends were.
Another student had a more personal question for Campos, asking, "How much do you get paid?" Campos simply smiled and said "technology is a good industry to be in."
Budding technology expert Rosie Valencia, who won an app-making competition and interned at Facebook, then got to interview Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who drove home the point that the changing world would mean that more jobs would be in technology.
"If you start with the assumption that everything in the future is going to be different than it is now, then it's not true that anyone else knows any more than you guys do about what's going to work in the future,'' Zuckerberg said.
Valencia also pressed Zuckerberg about Facebook's initiative to bring Internet connectivity to the billions of people around the world that don't currently have it.
"One way to, over time, create more peace and connectedness and a more functioning kind of world is to make sure everyone is exposed to all these different things," he stated, saying that certain ideas and global cultures are stifled by a lack of online sharing.
The overall message of the presentation was that it just takes an idea to start something big, and that the idea of something big can be daunting to those starting in technology.
"It's pretty daunting if you look at some big product that you want to build or change that you want to make in the world," Zuckerberg said. "You can get scared and decide that it's really hard to get started doing that. But everything big starts small."
