(CNN) -- Mark Zuckerberg went back to Harvard on Monday on a recruiting trip, his first visit since he dropped out of the prestigious university to found social-media giant Facebook.
Clad in his trademark hoodie and T-shirt, Zuckerberg told reporters, "This is a great time to come."
"There's a lot of really smart people here, and a lot of them are making decisions on where they are going to work when they graduate in the next couple of weeks," he said.
The university posted a slickly edited video on YouTube of Zuckerberg's outdoor remarks.
Zuckerberg quit Harvard and moved to California to found Facebook in 2004. The university's student newspaper says he was back on campus for the first time since he left to recruit students for internships at Facebook.
Students, not surprisingly, sounded 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.''
Harvard students applied for the Facebook internships within seconds of their being posted online, a university official told the Crimson.
Harvard, for its part, was happy to welcome back the billionaire drop-out.
"We're very happy to have him here. We've rolled out the red carpet," Tania deLuzuriaga, a spokeswoman for the university, said before Zuckerberg's arrival. "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."
The 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 before the visit.
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 on stage
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