Alumnus Bosworth presents to Leadership students

Saratoga alumnus, Harvard graduate and Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth told Leadership students about his journey from being a student at Saratoga High to becoming the director of engineering at Facebook.

The talk took place in the staff lounge on Dec. 1 and was attended by the Leadership students as well as several staff members.
Bosworth intended to alleviate student anxiety about the future, ensure that jobs at renowned companies such as Facebook or Microsoft are attainable and to encourage students to take a risk when presented with an opportunity.
Bosworth, 29, graduated from Saratoga High in 2000 and left behind quite a reputation. He was an extremely adept football and soccer player and was named athlete of the year. He claims to have been a good student, but admits he didn’t receive top honors.
“While at Saratoga, I was a good student, but was no where near the top. I wasn’t in very high honors. I wasn’t in high honors. In fact, I just sneaked into honors,” Bosworth said.
Bosworth’s account of his high school grades was a reassurance to the students listening to his talk.
Bosworth expressed his philosophy of life, which includes that people should have an open mind about the opportunities that come their way. This view was shaped by his own life experiences, especially the risk he took by leaving a prominent, stable job at Microsoft to join a largely unknown start-up.
Bosworth was recruited by Mark Zuckerburg to join Facebook due the ties that he had developed between them several years earlier while they were in college.
When Bosworth was in his senior year at Harvard, he was an assistant teacher in a computer science class taken by Mark Zuckerberg, a sophomore at the time.
After graduating from Harvard in 2004, Bosworth joined Microsoft and had worked as a developer in Seattle for two years before receiving an invitation from Zukerburg to join his fledgling company.
Bosworth had to make a challenging decision—to risk missing out something that he could love in the future, to leave behind a stable life and income and pursue something that seemed interesting. Bosworth chose the latter, and once Facebook became a worldwide sensation, the students could only wonder how disappointed Bosworth would’ve been if he had chosen to stay with Microsoft.
“Sometimes we are on a track, and we are so focused that we can end up missing numerous opportunities. It is scary to think how close I was to missing the opportunity to join Facebook,” Bosworth said.
Numerous leadership students thought that Bosworth’s talk was entertaining, inspiring and interesting.
Junior leadership student Sanjna Verma thoroughly enjoyed Bosworth’s sense of humor, and found it refreshing that Bosworth completely understood the immense pressure that Saratoga students experience.
“The presentation was really entertaining. Andrew Bosworth was hilarious and he knows about what we are going through, so he made a lot of jokes about our school life,” Verma said. “He told us not to be so focused on this imaginary track of life that we miss out on great opportunities.”
Junior Michael Lee also viewed the talk as a memorable experience.
“Bosworth made a big deal about getting off of the Saratoga ‘track’: getting the grades, going to college and getting a corporate job,” Lee said. “That was another major component of his speech; he encouraged finding what you love and passionately chasing after it.”
Bosworth loved Facebook from the beginning, even before it became such an enormous success.
“We had no idea how big the company was going to be,” said Bosworth. “We were just doing what we loved.”