Mark Zuckerberg Goes Back to School

 

SUMMARY: Facebook intends to fund a mobile app development class at Sequoia High School in Redwood City, Calif.

 

Mark Zuckerberg may not have finished college, but he returned to high school this week.
Students at Sequoia High School in Redwood City, Calif., were treated to a visit from Zuckerberg and Facebook CIO Tim Campos on Wednesday.



Campos announced plans to fund a mobile application development class at the high school, where students will learn the fundamentals for building the same types of apps they use every day.
"Part of how I got to where I am in my career is I started playing with technology when I was your guys' age," Campos told the crowd, as reported by The Almanac news.
Armed with 50 new Apple laptops meant for the upcoming course, Campos also answered students' questions about his work at Facebook and what the social network has planned for the future.
"Look at what is going [on] around you," Campos said. "Technology is changing everything in terms of how the world is working. It's an incredible opportunity to be a part of [it]."
Zuckerberg echoed that sentiment in a discussion with Sequoia student and former Facebook intern Rosie Valencia, who interviewed the CEO about the importance of technology in education. The simplest answer, he said, is that the worldwide tech sector opens the doors to a majority of well-paying jobs.
"If you look at history, the world evolves, and the jobs that people have evolve, and even some basic things like how you watch TV … and the nature of cars [evolve]," he said in the Q&A session (video below).
"Technology is playing a bigger and bigger role in all of these things, so the reality is if you want to have a better chance of getting a job … and if you want to get a job that pays more," Zuckerberg continued, "then being proficient in technology and knowing some basic things about how to use computers and use basic programming … is gonna be really critical to having a lot of options and doing what you want in the future."
Valencia, who participated in the 2014 Facebook Academy internship program and developed a top-20 mobile app for the Technovation competition, encouraged more girls to get into coding.
She also pressed Zuckerberg about his company's plans for global Internet access via the Internet.org initiative.
While more than 1 billion people have access to Facebook, billions more can't even run a Google search query or check the local weather forecast. To help remedy that, Zuckerberg's project launched in August 2013, and just recently released a new app that provides people in Zambia with free basic Web services.
"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 said, citing global cultures and ideas that are stifled by a lack of online sharing.
Not everyone will grow up to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, but they shouldn't stop trying, the boy wonder said, encouraging the higher schoolers to go to college and soak up everything they can about technology and life.
"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."
When it comes down to it, he said, "You just have to be brave enough to start."