W. Brad Distad Receives Alumni Community Service Award from McDaniel College

WESTMINSTER, MD (11/06/2012)(readMedia)-- W. Brad Distad of Yuba City, Calif., has received the alumni community service award from McDaniel College. He earned a bachelor's degree from McDaniel in 2004.

Presented annually during McDaniel's Homecoming, the alumni community service award is given to a graduate who has performed outstanding voluntary service to their community beyond normal business or professional obligations.

Distad received a bachelor's degree in geography with a minor in architecture from the University of Maryland, College Park, before enrolling at McDaniel where he graduated with a second bachelor's degree in theatre. He taught in Hagerstown, Md., where he often acted at the Washington County Playhouse Dinner Theatre. He then moved to China to teach English. While there, he wrote, directed and acted in two plays and performed for his students. He also offered guitar concerts and spent his summers speaking in various venues.

He is currently in his third year as an area director for Young Life in Yuba City, Calif., where he works in youth ministry leading music on the guitar, creating videos, acting in plays, facilitating games and speaking in public. He is anticipating becoming a member of the program team at Young Life's Woodleaf Camp in February 2013.

For more information about McDaniel College, visit www.mcdaniel.edu.

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McDaniel College, recognized nationally among "40 Colleges that Change Lives" and U.S. News top-tier liberal arts colleges, is a four-year private college of the liberal arts and sciences offering more than 70 undergraduate programs of study, including dual and student-designed majors, plus 20 highly regarded graduate programs. Its hallmark faculty-student collaborations in research, teaching and mentoring plus hundreds of leadership and service opportunities enrich a lively learning experience that is rooted in a personalized interdisciplinary and global curriculum. Innovative January courses take students to points all over the world while McDaniel's degree-granting European campus offers a unique opportunity for international study at the only American university in Budapest, Hungary. A diverse and close-knit community of 1,600 undergraduates and 1,560 part-time graduate students, McDaniel also boasts a spectacular 160-acre hilltop campus in Westminster, Md., an hour or less from Baltimore, D.C., the Chesapeake Bay, an Amtrak station and BWI international airport.