Editor’s note: Despite repeated requests, Safet Mesanovic declined to have The Daily Orange take an individual portrait of him.

Safet Mesanovic is often asked where he’s from.

“I hate that question,” said Mesanovic, a write-in candidate for Student Association president. At 20 years old, he has lived in four different countries and currently spends his summers with family in Dubai.

Still, he grins as his friend and running mate, sophomore Gener Romeu Oliva, insists that Mesanovic, a junior economics major, loves telling the story of his international upbringing.

In the pair’s platform, they have pledged to put the ideas of students over their own, and ensure the voices of all students be heard, even those of international students like themselves and other marginalized groups. To do this, they don’t have set campaign goals, rather they are using student ideas as the basis for their platform.

Mesanovic met his future running mate Oliva in Day Hall while they were stranded on campus along with other international students during 2013 Thanksgiving break. Mesanovic and his roommate were combing the empty dorms on the Mount, knocking on every door trying to recruit kids for a snowball fight when he first crossed paths with Oliva.

“I opened my door, and at the end of the hallway is this guy,” Oliva chuckled at the memory. “He was so excited.”

“Yeah, because he was one of the only people around,” Mesanovic laughed. Oliva ended up joining them for the night, the beginning of a long friendship that is now culminating in a run for student government.

Born in Freiburg, Germany to a pair of Bosnian refugees, Mesanovic said he remembers very little of his childhood there. He never experienced the raging ethnic violence that drove his parents out of Bosnia in the early 1990s.

“I see them as role models, knowing they went through that and got to where they are today,” Mesanovic said.

At the age of 4, Mesanovic moved with his little brother and parents to Syracuse. The family settled in on Elm Street, which straddles the border between the Near Northeast and Lincoln Hill neighborhoods in urban Syracuse.

His father took a job as a pizza delivery man when the family first arrived in Syracuse. By the time Mesanovic was 16, his father had earned a master’s degree in mathematics from SU and was working as a teaching assistant at the university and as a professor at Morrisville State College.

It was around that time his parents decided to make a change.

“Well, my mom saw a documentary on Dubai and she said to my dad, ‘We should just go there,’” Mesanovic recalled. “It was just on a whim.”

When his family jetted off to Dubai, Mesanovic had no idea what to expect. What he found was “the richest place in the world you could imagine, the best of the best.”

Living in Dubai in his teenage years and traveling around Europe with his parents gave him a much wider perspective on the world, Mesanovic said.

“You just realize there are so many other people, and so many other countries in the world,” he said. “There’s so many unique people I wouldn’t have met or expected to be friends with.”

When the time came to choose colleges, one of the reasons he chose SU was the opportunity to study abroad in Florence the first semester of his freshman year through SU’s Discovery Florence program.

Mesanovic said he originally had a much different professional focus than economics — he wanted a career in pro soccer and he said he thought living in Florence would allow him to play for an under-18 league team.

While in Florence, Mesanovic gradually realized that a career in professional soccer wasn’t for him.

“It got to be overwhelming. I realized it’s like 20 percent football and 80 percent other stuff,” he said. Mesanovic, who said he doesn’t drink or take drugs, added that the party lifestyle surrounding professional soccer didn’t appeal to him. He added that he considered other downsides of pursuing soccer as a career, such as potential injuries and long hours of training.

For Mesanovic, coming back to Syracuse for his second semester was a dose of hard reality in another way. The idealistic image of the U.S. and Syracuse he had left over in his mind from his childhood was gone.

“I was just a kid, you know?” Mesanovic said. “I didn’t really see any of the bad things in the area ‘til I came back. You can hear gunshots in my old neighborhood now.”

Adrift and unsure of his future, Mesanovic spent much of that semester watching news, eventually getting hooked on “this channel called Bloomberg,” a part of the media company owned by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg that focuses on the financial sector.

Discovering Bloomberg News was the spark that pushed Mesanovic to dedicate himself to studying the financial system. He even used some of his own money to experiment on the stock market, and remembers that as the moment he realized what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

“You’re actually in today’s world and using your knowledge to make money,” Mesanovic said.

Published on April 14, 2015 at 11:44 pm

Contact Thomas: tjbeckle@syr.edu