Drogin has won a number of awards during his career, including the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and two prizes for his book, "Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War," a story of the Iraqi informant, who was a key source of false claims about Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).
Halfway into his sophomore year, he traveled to Japan, to study for a semester as a participant in "the Experiment in International living," a family stay program.
After the semester was finished, he spent time in a Zen monastery in Kyoto, for a short period, and then traveled in Japan.
[3][5] As a student at Oberlin College, Drogin worked for a year as the managing editor of the school newspaper, the Review.
"[3] After graduating from Columbia, he worked as a freelance photographer for a New York agency, Magnum Photos, where he covered a presidential election, prizefights and other events for various magazines.
[3] After leaving the Observer, he returned to Cambodia with UNICEF, and served for six-months as the deputy director for Relief on the Cambodian border.
[3] Drogin began his work at The Los Angeles Times as a national correspondent based in New York City.