What happened when this intern emailed the Macquarie CEO for advice

As a 19-year-old intern at Macquarie Group, Miki Cvijetic wanted advice on how to get into investment banking but wasn’t sure who to ask – so he emailed the then-chief executive, Nicholas Moore.

The first-year university student also emailed Michael Carapiet, the head of Macquarie Capital, and John Roberts, the head of Macquarie Capital Funds. All three agreed to meet him, and advised him to finish his bachelor of accounting and to study law and commerce before applying for investment banking programs.

“I was very ambitious and knew what I wanted to do, but one of the challenges I had was that I didn’t have anyone to talk to at home who could give me advice,” Cvijetic tells The Australian Financial Review.

A decade earlier, Cvijetic and his family arrived in Australia fleeing civil war in Yugoslavia. Back then he could not speak English and had developed a serious stutter from the trauma of growing up in a war zone.

“I was born into a Serbian Christian Orthodox family in Sarajevo. A bullet missed my head by about 15 centimetres when I was only 8 months old – it hit my baby cradle where I was sleeping – and for the remainder of the war we would regularly have our neighbourhood shelled with bullets, grenades and bombs,” Cvijetic says.

The family migrated to Australia as refugees in 1999 and were placed in a housing commission apartment in Liverpool in south-west Sydney.

At university and working full-time, Cvijetic didn’t exactly follow the three Macquarie executives’ advice. He skipped the law degree to start working in investment banking with Barclays at 21. Two years later he went into private equity, and was promoted to his current role as investment director of Boab Capital when he was 27.

“I was supporting my family financially and the idea of studying an extra few years and deferring my career was not appealing as an option,” Cvijetic says.

But the Macquarie executives inspired Cvijetic to chase his career path. He also credits the generosity of others, including his parents, basketball coaches and his high school maths teacher, with helping him find success.

After arriving in Australia, Cvijetic learnt English quickly and would help his father, Zeljko, who was a maths professor before the war, and his mother, Ruza, previously a director of marketing for a large company, navigate government forms at Centrelink.

The family would go to a warehouse run by The Smith Family twice a year to choose second-hand clothing. From there they were referred to The Smith Family scholarship program, which provided money that Cvijetic used when he was 10 to buy a basketball and shoes to join the Obilic Basketball Club in Cabramatta.

“Obilic is where I spent so many hours in my formative years rather than getting into trouble in the neighbourhood,” he says.

The Smith Family funding also paid for boxing and swimming lessons, and Cvijetic was accepted into the talented athletes program at Westfields Sports High School. Following high school, he majored in finance and accounting at the University of Technology, Sydney, as part of the Bachelor of Accounting Co-op Scholarship Program.

“That scholarship money allowed me to pursue basketball, which landed me a spot at Westfields with many other talented athletes and ultimately paved the way for me to be part of a selective program at university with a small group of very impressive students, which in turn set up my career,” Cvijetic says.

This article originally appeared on The Australian Financial Review.