My name is Atul Varma and I am currently a senior at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. I enjoy using technology, as it is the easiest and most flexible outlet of creativity for me. However, as of late my interests have spread into other areas, the most influential of which are sociology and public service. You can see my resume here if you're interested.

When it comes to computers, I consider myself to be a sort of 'jack-of-all-trades', as I have at least dipped my feet into a wide variety of subjects. I first started using computers in my early childhood (I recall copying a BASIC program that drew a triangle on my ATARI 400 with my mother when I was 3 or 4 years old), and have delved into anything that has seemed interesting since then. This has included fields from programming in BASIC, QuickBasic, HyperCard, SuperCard, Pascal, Delphi, C, C++, JavaScript, and some interesting excursions into the world of LISP and assembly language. In the past several years I've also been into raytracing and graphic design, and creating websites. My primary area of academic interest is to study the way that technology affects our society, our identity, and our perceptions of ourselves, particularly in respect to online virtual communities such as MUDs and varieties of interactive narrative such as computer games.

I really enjoy working in groups of people who have an equal amount of ability, or are willing to put the same amount of work into a project. I first really realized this when I worked collaboratively with my friend Erik Christensen on the creation of a JAVA text-based Multi-User Dimension "from scratch" in the December of 1998. I hadn't been able to experience this kind of collaborative activity before because no one I know was into computer programming during my chilhood--as a result, almost all of what I've learned throughout my life regarding computers has been self-taught.

On the non-computer side of things, I enjoy playing guitar upside-down and backwards (read: playing a right-handed gutar left handed, without the strings reversed, because that's what felt the most natural when I was teaching myself how to play from internet guitar tabs and tutorials which did a great job at describing the technicalities of chord structure but failed in mentioning exactly how to HOLD the thing).

I also enjoy spending time with my friends very much. They have often accused me of being silly and foppish (of course, I'm not really foppish, I just like the word "fop."). One of the most memorable times of my life was during the spring of 1997, during my senior year of high school, when I went to Mexico with my friends to build a house for a needy family in the outskirts of Tijuana.

The picture to the right, entitled The Great Fop, was taken at the building site by Ferf Schlosser and post-processed by myself.