Imagine starting out your day with a large coffee and heading to your New Venture Strategies lecture. Then you rush over to teach private music classes. After that, you’ll go over back to campus to put together a video for ASUNM. You end your day in hitting the gym or writing a case study, maybe procrastinating by making a new song to put out on your SoundCloud. This back-to-back schedule is a daily routine for UNM sophomore Joshua Romero, and he is addicted to the hustle.

“I basically just want to tell the story of life through my perspective, through any medium that I can.”

Romero was recently hired as the filmmaker for UNM’s Student Activities Center (SAC), where he’ll be creating a documentary of the university’s annual Fiestas 2017. His desire to share different stories is what drives him to create a story of his own.

Romero started out at a young age with a love of the arts. Music came first – his parents put him in piano lessons that he initially hated. Eventually, the piano became his favorite instrument. And a couple of years later, he broadened his musical horizons with the guitar and drums.

“I started to understand music as a language. I was a quiet kid growing up, and music became my voice. It was my first method to tell my story.”

Through word of mouth, Romero began teaching private lessons when he was 14. Now he’s training 17 students, ages five to 45.

During his child years, Romero was also looking into film. “My childhood friend had a MacBook and I was amazed,” he said. “It had a webcam and we would recreate stupid videos we found on the internet. The rest is history.”

And that it was. Romero’s love for music and film took a professional turn when he started working on his own music and film projects. “My senior year is when I began writing my own songs. Years of music lessons were finally coming together, and it felt great.”

Romero was freelancing, teaching private lessons and doing film projects for various companies. When he got to UNM, he wanted to get involved with what he has learned. “I told Student Activities, ‘Look, I have these skills. Is there anything I can do for UNM with them?’ And they let me work Silent Lights. I volunteered at a couple more events, and they eventually offered me a job.”

Romero saw UNM as an outlet for his creative work, and it allowed him to contribute to UNM’s story. “I felt like I had a really purposeful reason to be at school,” He said. “They encouraged and facilitated my creativity.”

Romero’s biggest project for UNM is to tell the story of this year’s Fiestas through film.

“That’s what Fiestas is, they’re telling a story with it. A story of UNM. It’s a representation of our art as a whole- whether it be filmmaking, music, art, student groups, and kinda just the togetherness. Fiestas is a way to bring everyone together.

“It’s promoting community and friendship and that’s the story we are trying to tell.”