One of Penn State’s recently prominent graduates is moving on from a highly coveted journalism job as the AP’s chief White House correspondent, according to a release yesterday.

Ben Feller, a 1992 Penn State graduate in journalism, has previously worked for The Centre Daily Times. He joined the White House beat in 2006, covering all aspects of the Bush presidency, and was named as AP’s Chief Correspondent in 2010.

Feller is often mentioned in conversations about well-known Penn State graduates. It’s well deserved, as Feller won the 2010 Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency, as well as the Merriman Smith Award for presidential reporting on deadline. For a writer who started out as a Centre Daily Times stringer for $15 a story, working his way up to the highest national audience is quite an accomplishment, and one that students in Penn State’s College of Communications should look to as an example.

Feller plans to move to New York City where his wife works as a New York Times editor.

For more on Feller’s experiences at Penn State (including some awesome anecdotes about accidentally dropping all of his classes one semester), check out this video: