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50-year-old receives President’s Freshman Award
	Dan Weiser, 50, a letters, arts and sciences student who resides in Fishers, Ind., is a recipient of the President’s Freshman Award for academic achievement, the first Penn State World Campus student to receive the honor. He won the award for earning a perfect 4.0 grade-point average in his first year.   “He’s a dedicated student; he’s very focused,” Jane Ireland, his academic adviser, said. “We’re very proud of him here at the World Campus.”   Established in 1960, the President’s Freshman Award is presented annually to undergraduate degree candidates and provisional students who have earned a 4.0 cumulative grade-point average based on at least 12 credits completed by the end of the fall semester of the academic year the award is given. Candidates are eligible for this award if they have not exceeded 35 total credits.   Weiser said he decided to go back to school after completing a professional certification program delivered through the Internet by a local university. “I didn’t want to stop learning,” he said.   With an intensive job managing the engineering department at Roche Diagnostics, an Indianapolis-based company that maintains diagnostic systems, he decided that Web-based learning was the only convenient way for him to get an education.   “The Internet is the true future of adult education,” he said.   After shopping around for distance education programs, he decided on Penn State, because “I saw they had a beautiful system, and I couldn’t find anything comparable.”   Ireland noted Weiser’s high grade-point average is unusual among adults who come back to school.   “Often it may take people a course or two to get back into the routine of academia. What they have is a determination to complete the degree, if it’s not their first experience,” she said.   Weiser said he enjoys learning more than the idea of getting a degree.   “The difference between an adult student and a typical freshman who comes to college directly from high school is that I can take a lot of things the professor is explaining and tie it back to real life. What once seemed irrelevant when I was younger is now important,” he said.