Grants and Writing Resources for Kyushu University

The final of the Kyushu U 3MT Competition 2025 in July 2025 brought together twelve doctoral students from nine graduate schools, each explaining their research in three minutes with one slide. First place went to a fifth-year integrated doctoral student in the Graduate School of Systems Life Sciences, who was chosen to represent Kyushu in the University of Queensland's virtual Asia-Pacific semi-final. A second-year doctoral student in the Graduate School of Economics took runner-up in 2026. Each prize is a research grant paid to the winner's laboratory.

Presenting Research

Kyushu has held its own round of the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition every year since 2021. It's open to doctoral students, including third- to fifth-year students in integrated doctoral courses, and talks are given in English. Prizes are research grants paid to the winner's laboratory: 300,000 yen for first prize, 200,000 yen for runner-up and 100,000 yen for People's Choice. The university recommends spending them on travel to international conferences. The first-prize winner gets help with the talk and the video before the Asia-Pacific 3MT Competition.

Doctoral Funding

Kyushu's SPRING doctoral program, run since FY2024 as the Kyushu University Program to Cultivate Innovative PhDs for a Better Future (K²-SPRING) and recruiting its FY2027 intake as K³-SPRING, supports selected doctoral students. Its admission page lists a research aid of 200,000 yen a month, including 20,000 yen toward language skills, plus research expenses of 350,000 yen a year and an exemption from half of tuition. From FY2027, support for international students is limited to the research expenses. More research money can come through selection for the program's Integrated Research Projects. Non-degree research students can't apply.

Help With Writing

The University Library's support for reports and presentations centers on its Library TAs, known as Cuter. They answer questions at the Learning Support Desk in the library or through a webform, teach the Report Writing Workshop for Beginners each April, and give a model presentation at the Presentation Workshop for Beginners each June. First-year science students also get an Experimental Report Writing Workshop for Beginners in spring and fall.

Workshop recordings are on Kyushu's Moodle, in Japanese. The library's Cute.Guides, in Japanese, include an introduction to writing reports and dissertations for new and international students in the humanities and social sciences.

Where Dissertations Are Published

Doctoral dissertations for degrees conferred on or after April 1, 2013 are published online in the Kyushu University Institutional Repository (QIR). Full text is the default. If the graduate school accepts an unavoidable reason, a summary can go up instead, and the full text should follow once that reason ends. QIR also holds journal articles, technical reports and departmental bulletin papers by Kyushu researchers and graduate students, who can deposit work themselves or ask the library to do it.

When your draft is close and you want a careful last read, our editors are available. See our Kyushu University dissertation and thesis editing and Kyushu University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.