Marko Čeperković

The year before my master’s studies I was in the US – completing the Aitchison Fellowship in Government at Johns Hopkins University and working full-time as a foreign policy advisor at the US House of Representatives. I learned about the dual degree program between SciencesPo and the LSE and, feeling fundamentally European and rather enthusiastic about Europe and the EU, I was certain it was the ideal  course for me. Several months later, I was fortunate enough to be selected for the dual degree and found myself preparing for my journey in Paris and London.

If there is one word to summarize my experience at the LSE that word is freedom. Freedom of thought, expression, and critical thinking. No idea was a stupid idea, no thought was not good enough to be heard. The extraordinary group of professors at the EI were there for us at any time - in the classroom and at the pub - and it all made for a lively exchange that would have been impossible to achieve in lengthy lectures. Instead, the entire LSE campus was a learning experience.

Furthermore, the year we spent there was a rather tumultuous year of the Brexit vote, Trump, and the extreme right-wing rising across Europe. The methods, structure and academic foundations of the EI helped bring some sense of what was going on and what the future might bring, and ultimately prepared me for my next chapter - imagining the future of the Western Balkans at the European Union Institute for Security Studies (“EUISS”) in Paris.

My first job after graduation was at the EUISS in Paris as an associate analyst in charge of EU-Western Balkans relations research. In this role, I heavily relied on the skills acquired during my time at the LSE - understanding what the issues are, distilling them into more understandable problems, pinpointing the factors behind them, and ultimately finding potential solutions. During my time at the EUISS, I focused on strategic foresight and thinking about the future. This is truly challenging, as thinking about the future entails being able to remove yourself from the present in order to observe from a distance - and this is what the LSE taught me to do. While at the EUISS, I started teaching two courses at SciencesPo - Western Balkans and the EU and EU Decision-Making. In my classes, I genuinely tried to model my LSE experience and pass on these learning tools to the next wave of young scholars.

Ultimately, I decided to switch to the private sector and joined Goldman Sachs, where I work as Financial Crime Compliance Officer - daily assessing the firm’s compliance, regulatory and reputational risk from an anti-money laundering perspective. I am currently leading the Firm’s jurisdictional risk analysis, which reviews legislative, political, economic and crime-related changes across the globe in order to create a categorization of jurisdictions in order to help fight money laundering and terror financing.

All this is to say that there is no single career trajectory. What is important are the skills and knowledge that you bring with you - the very same skills and knowledge that everyone at the LSE so selflessly helped me acquire.