Attending the UI is a Carley family tradition — even moreso than Brian realized before arriving on campus as a freshman accounting major in the '70s.
“While riding my bike home from a date, I cut through the cemetery east of Memorial Stadium. I was surprised to see a large mausoleum with the name ‘Mark Carley.’ I thought nothing of it other than an unusual coincidence until doing research with kids for their ancestry homework, and I am directly related to the Carleys that settled in Champaign County in the 1800s," says Carley, now the CFO and senior VP at Clubessential, a software as service company serving the club and resort markets.
“A few years later, I take my high school son on a tour of the campus and in touring the library archives on a Saturday afternoon, the nice caretaker said hi and offered to do some free quick research. He quickly found that my grandfather, Paul Carley, not only graduated and got his medical degree from U of I — I knew that — but he found the note where he was ‘excused from class’ for disagreeing with his professor.”
