Daniel Monroy, an 18-year-old computer science major from Guatemala, revealed that he is the elusive creator of the popular UTexas Memes Facebook page that has garnered nearly 14,000 ‘likes’ since its creation last Sunday.

“I really like reading memes and when I saw one that I was able to relate to I thought, ‘What if every student at UT could also relate to this one?’” Monroy said. On a Facebook page for a class Monroy is enrolled in, a few memes were posted and achieved over one hundred ‘likes’ in a few hours. This led him to create UTexas Memes.

Daniel Monroy

Memes are humorous photos that surf the web with statements about everyday life, often in large block-lettering. They can be generated by anyone with a computer and are very hard to track down. UTexas Memes allows fans of the page to create their own memes about life at UT and post them for everyone to view.

“I was not expecting it, but with thousands of ‘likes’ within hours, I knew it was going to go viral,” Monroy said.

UTexas Memes has gained immense popularity within the UT community as well as spawned other meme pages for college campuses across the world. Other colleges that have meme pages include Texas A&M, University of Minnesota, Stanford, Yale and even universities in Canada and Scotland.

“My friends think it's really cool and have said that they want a part if I become the next Mark Zuckerberg,” Monroy said.

Although other meme page creators decided to reveal their identity from the start of the creation of their pages, Monroy remained mysterious about his identity. In an article from The Alcalde, Monroy would only reveal that he was a freshman at UT.

“At first I didn't want to reveal it because if it was a failure it would suck,” Monroy said. “Then I just went along with keeping it a secret because it also intrigued the subscribers as to find who I was.”

Monroy posted the UTexas Memes page on his personal Facebook wall and told several of his close friends that he was the creator. “It was not difficult to keep it a secret because I only told the people who asked me if I created it. So, truth is it really wasn't hard at all to find who I was,” Monroy said.

The future of UTexas Memes is looking bright. Since the creation of the Facebook page a Twitter account and Tumblr have been made for UTexas Memes. Monroy is also in the beginning stages of planning t-shirt designs.

When asked how he felt about his new fans the modest Monroy chuckled, “I have fans? I just hope that [people] enjoy the page and keep posting memes.”