Last Thursday I went to San Francisco to meet up with a few friends from the College of Computer and Information Science and to attend Startup School 2011 at Stanford. The event was a series of talks by well-known startup founders (including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook!) and some famous investors.

Perhaps the most famous was Ashton Kutcher (yes, the Ashton Kutcher). Ashton is the founder of A Grade Investments, and was invited by the event sponsors to talk about his involvement with startups and entrepreneurship in general. We got a chance to see a side of him that most people never do.

We also got a chance to meet up with a couple Northeastern alums at other points during the weekend (including one who was a TA for one of our freshman year courses) to hear about their post-Northeastern lives, and we saw another friend who’s currently on co-op at Google in Mountain View.

The coolest part about the trip was that it was entirely school-sponsored. Thanks to alumni support, CCIS has been able to send students to enriching events like these all around the country. Later this week, eleven CCIS students from CISters (a student group with the intention of supporting females interested in computer science and information science fields) are going to Portland, OR to attend the 2011 Grace Hopper Celebration. In May, I went to San Francisco to attend Google I/O with six others. Last year, CCIS sent a few students to the LISA conference in San Jose, CA.