Born in Tansa, Iași County, he attended primary school in his native village, where his father was a teacher. He graduated from the National College in 1899 and from the science faculty of Iași University in 1905, where his mentor was Ion Th. Simionescu. He then worked as an assistant in the geology and paleontology laboratory, beginning field studies in Bahna and Broșteni. In 1908, he was an intern at the Vienna Museum of Natural History. He defended a doctoral thesis about the geology of the tertiary basin at Bahna in 1909. Macovei was then hired as assistant geologist at the Romanian Geological Institute in Bucharest, working under Ludovic Mrazek, whom he had come to know while at Broșteni. From 1909 to 1911, he continued to specialize in biostratigraphy at laboratories in Paris, Grenoble and Lausanne, and on the steppes between the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea in 1913. During World War I, he undertook geological studies in the Moldavia region, seeking to provide mineral raw materials for the economy and the populace.