Zuckerberg returns to Harvard to recruit for Facebook

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff

The One That Got Away is coming back.

Facebook founder and Harvard University dropout Mark Zuckerberg will return to his alma mater on Monday in search of bright students who’d like to work or intern at his hugely successful online social network. It will be his first official visit to the school. Zuckerberg is also stopping at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to meet with students there.

Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, when he was a Harvard undergraduate. Local venture capital firms rebuffed his efforts to raise additional funds to expand the business, and Zuckerberg moved the company to Palo Alto, Calif., after finding willing investors in Silicon Valley. Today, Facebook is among the world’s most popular Internet services, with more than 800 million registered users.

But it seems that Beantown still has a place in Zuckerberg’s heart. During a meeting at Stanford University last weekend, he said, “If I were starting now, I would have just stayed in Boston.’’

Zuckerberg and Facebook’s vice president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, plan to meet with about 200 Harvard computer science students, as well as officials of the university.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.