Grants and Writing Resources for Boston University

In July 2026 BU Today reported that Boston University had been named a Fulbright Top Producing Institution for the sixth year in a row, with its newest Fulbright students and recent alumni bound for 10 countries to do research, take up graduate study and teach English. One will research endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome. Another, a human physiology graduate headed for medical school, will spend the year teaching English in secondary schools.

Paid Research for Undergraduates

Any full-time BU undergraduate can apply to the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) for a stipend to work on a project supervised by a BU faculty member. A Student Research Award pays up to $750 for five hours a week in the fall or spring. Under a Faculty Matching Grant, UROP and the mentor split the cost, and the semester award goes as high as $1,500 for ten hours a week. Full-time summer research pays $7,000 for ten weeks at 40 hours a week. A student can be funded twice at most and can't take academic credit and a UROP stipend for the same research.

UROP also gives special awards tied to particular fields and students, such as the Nelson Research Award for summer work in communications and the Newbury Center Award for first-generation students. It no longer pays for conference travel or supplies, and its travel page sends students to the CAS Student Academic Enhancement Fund and to department travel money instead. Projects go on show at the UROP Symposium, a poster event that filled four sessions in the GSU Metcalf Ballroom in October 2026.

Prizes and a Journal for Student Writing

Each spring the College of Arts & Sciences gives up to five Alumni Awards for Writing Excellence of $500 apiece. Two go to the humanities. The natural sciences, the social sciences, and mathematics and computational sciences get one each. The writer has to be a graduating CAS senior, and the entry must be expository, analytical or research writing of 3,000 to 10,000 words from a junior- or senior-year course or Work for Distinction. Students can nominate a paper with the consent of the professor who assigned it, and faculty can put forward their best student writers.

Deerfield is the Writing Program's journal, named for the street beside the program's building, and each issue prints a sampling of the best undergraduate work from its courses. Its submission rules accept research papers and arguments along with podcasts, comics and photo essays, and every entry is considered for one of up to four Prize Project Awards. The program's first journal, WR, published student writing from 2008 to 2021.

Tutors and Writing Fellows

Students with papers from Writing Program courses book free one-on-one sessions at the CAS Writing Center, either in the Writers' Studio on the third floor of 100 Bay State Road or by video, one appointment a week. Papers for other CAS courses go to the Simpson Undergraduate Writing Fellows, advanced majors and minors who tutor writing in their fields. This year 22 Fellows cover 13 departments and programs, from biology and economics to philosophy and the Pardee School of Global Studies.

Graduate students have a separate service. The Educational Resource Center's Graduate Writing Support is free, and its Writing Fellows are BU graduate students who read anything from a literature review to a dissertation chapter in 45-minute appointments on Zoom or at 100 Bay State Road. Twenty-minute drop-in sessions need no booking. The ERC also holds multi-day writing retreats and a four-day Dissertation Writing Institute for students drafting a prospectus or dissertation.

Dissertation Fellowships and Submission

New Arts & Sciences PhD students can receive up to five years of fellowship funding. The PhD aid page lists dissertation awards on top of that, including a $15,000 Dean's Dissertation Fellowship for students in years four through six, paid in fall 2026 or spring 2027. In the spring 2026 cycle, GRAF grants for research abroad and GRUF grants for research in the United States outside greater Boston each paid up to $16,250 for long-term projects. Students in the last stage of writing can apply to the Society of Fellows, whose dissertation completion fellows received a $47,740.50 stipend for 2026-27 and present work in progress at a weekly colloquium.

BU theses and dissertations are submitted to the library electronically. The library's thesis and dissertation guide has templates by school and degree, and its ETD Administrator instructions cover the single PDF with embedded fonts that ProQuest requires. Finished work is also posted free to read in OpenBU, the university repository.

Before a BU seminar paper, prospectus or dissertation goes to a professor or committee, our editors can check its grammar, consistency and format in a final edit. Visit our Boston University dissertation and thesis editing and Boston University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.

From Our Writing Guides

• How to Write an Analytical Essay: Analysis vs. Interpretation
• Literature Synthesis: Moving Beyond the Summary toward Authority
• Escaping the Revision Pile: Strategies for First-Round Approval