Steve Curley ’07MBA admits he wasn’t always the best student. But he did have a passion: finance. Growing up, he loved learning about all the different methods of managing and investing money.

“Because I knew what I wanted to do at an early age,” he says, “I viewed school as a waste of time if it wasn’t finance related.”

Planned giving is accessible to Knights of all ages and stages. To learn more about building your legacy with UCF, explore the Office of Gift Planning’s new, reimagined website.

It wasn’t until his junior year as a finance and banking major at the University of North Florida that his perspective on education shifted. He realized that when given the opportunity to use his full potential, classroom learning could be engaging, even fun.

Following graduation, he landed a job in commercial banking, where he decided to pursue an MBA at the University of Central Florida.

“I chose UCF because it was such a great value for the quality of the education,” he says. “But more importantly, I believe in the UCF mission: making education accessible to everyone.”

Curley, now the founder of the wealth management firm 55 North Private Wealth, has carried forward that mission by creating scholarships in honor of his late grandmother and mother — both of whom shaped his egalitarian view of education and inspired him to open doors for others.

Paving the Way for Future Civic Leaders

One of Curley’s fondest memories of his grandmother, Fredna (“Freddy”), was riding around with her as she conducted Gallup surveys in low-income areas throughout Central Florida. She had a reputation for going into neighborhoods that other canvassers typically avoided — but she felt strongly that speaking to residents in these communities was key to improving their lives and addressing demographic disparities.

“She loved research and politics, even though she didn’t have a college degree,” Curley says.

Freddy’s work in government began in the late 1930s, when she was briefly employed with the FBI and the Civil Aeronautics Authority in Washington, D.C. She realized, however, that an office job was not for her and decided to pursue a different career path.

In 1942, she joined American Airlines as a flight attendant — a position that, at the time, highly valued women for their charm and good looks. But Freddy’s work as a stewardess went well beyond serving beverages and smiling at passengers. She often met and cared for highly decorated military officers — one of whom, Pete, an Army captain in World War II, would become her husband of 31 years.

She moved to Orlando in 1952 and became involved in the League of Women Voters. Years later, she was instrumental in the campaigns of former Representative Dick Batchelor and former Senator Bill Nelson, early in their political careers. She also worked for the Bureau of Labor Statistics for over 10 years in the ’70s and had her own market research company, contracting with the National Opinion Research Center (now called NORC at the University of Chicago).

When she died at the age of 93 on Christmas Eve in 2013, Curley wanted to pay homage to his grandmother’s memory and her lifelong efforts in civic engagement. He remembered a friend at the University of North Florida telling him about starting a scholarship fund to commemorate a family member, and decided he wanted to do something similar for his grandmother. So he and his aunt Louise (Freddy’s daughter and UCF alumna) provided the seed funding for the scholarship and offered a dollar-for-dollar match for any family member who wanted to contribute.

In 2015, the Curley family established the Freddy Armfield Curley Memorial Endowed Scholarship, which provides first- or second-year UCF students in the LEAD Scholars Program with financial assistance each semester to cover tuition, fees, books and other educational expenses. Throughout the program, scholars contribute thousands of hours of community service, giving them the opportunity to build professional experience and develop skills as civic leaders.

“Rather than come up with something new and create a bunch of restrictions for it,” Curley says, “we wanted to plug into something that was already doing great work. The UCF LEAD Scholars Program was perfect because it’s local, and it represents so much of what my grandmother stood for — inspiring meaningful change in the communities that need it most.”

Overcoming the Odds

The first sign that something was wrong came on Father’s Day of 2021. Curley and his wife, Jess, were hosting his family and watching golf, when his mother asked Jess, a physician assistant at an ear, nose and throat clinic, to look at a bump on her neck. Alarmed, she advised Curley’s mother to see a doctor as soon as possible.

The bump turned out to be Stage IV throat cancer.

After surviving surgery where she nearly lost her larynx (commonly called “the voice box”) and multiple rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, things looked more hopeful for Curley’s mother. But in the summer of 2022, a year after her throat cancer diagnosis, she was diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

“That was when everything went downhill,” Curley says. “At that point, this was a battered and bruised body, so enduring more aggressive treatments proved to be more than she could take.”

Pam Curley died in October of 2022. Curley proudly refers to his mother as “the most selfless person I have ever known.”

Remembering the success of his grandmother’s scholarship, Curley and Jess decided to do the same for his mother. In April 2024, they established the Pam Curley Memorial Endowed Scholarship Fund, which will provide financial support to accounting majors who identify as nontraditional students. This endowed scholarship will exist in perpetuity, with a portion of the annual earnings going toward scholarship disbursements each year.

The scholarship is a nod to his mother’s UCF experience as a nontraditional student. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in accounting, and later became a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) — a designation that’s challenging to achieve at any age considering that the average national pass rate is below 50%, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

“My mom enrolled in college when I was in grade school, and I remember watching her grind through her studies,” Curley says. “It was so wonderful to see her at graduation, knowing how she stuck with it, how disciplined she had to be to start school with a bunch of 20-somethings — all while raising a family as my father worked 60+ hours a week.”

While his mother may not have fit the mold of a traditional college student — young, spirited, aspirational — she approached her goals with a practical shrewdness and had the determination to stay the course, no matter how daunting the road ahead sometimes seemed.

“She’s the reason I have my CFA [Chartered Financial Analyst] certification, my most prized designation, and was an inspiration behind founding my wealth management firm, 55 North,” Curley says. “Watching her work so hard all those years taught me that if I committed myself to something, then I could achieve it.”

Living the UCF Values

While Curley admires many characteristics of his mother and grandmother, he acknowledges that they also had very distinct personalities. He describes his grandmother as gregarious — “the life of the party, the one who would go up to anyone and start a conversation.” His mother, on the other hand, was shy and introverted. But she was also, according to Curley, “an empath,” someone who always thought about the well-being of others.

“If she was at a party,” he says, “she would find the person who was standing alone or looked like they were being left out and talk to them. She wanted to make sure everyone felt like they belonged.”

In many respects, Curley’s grandmother and mother embody the values that encapsulate the UCF ethos — integrity, inclusivity, perseverance, stewardship, advocacy. Look around campus, and you’ll see students like Freddy: changemakers who want to shape a better world for future generations. You’ll also find students like Pam: parents and caretakers pursuing their ambitions with a steady resolve, despite facing significant obstacles.

Once Curley found a subject he loved and a purpose for learning, he saw education less as an obligation and more as an opportunity, the chance to build a better life for himself — and forge a path for others to follow.

“These scholarships are creating learning and career pathways that can change the trajectory of someone’s life.”

Since graduating from UCF, he has been actively involved in building its long-term success; he is an adviser for the UCF Foundation’s Investment Committee and serves on the finance board for the College of Business. He also has participated in the College of Business’s Graduate Mentorship Program, collaborating with different mentees to help them achieve their professional finance goals. Still, he regards the scholarships he created in memory of his grandmother and mother as his most meaningful contribution to the UCF community.

“These scholarships are creating learning and career pathways that can change the trajectory of someone’s life,” Curley says. “Education offers the greatest return on investment, and I think in terms of meeting students where they are and unlocking their potential, UCF is doing that better than any school out there.”

Planned giving is accessible to Knights of all ages and stages. To learn more about building your legacy with UCF, explore the Office of Gift Planning’s new, reimagined website.