Grants and Writing Resources for Loyola University Chicago

Two Loyola law teams took national moot court titles in the 2025-26 season. In November 2025 a pair of students won the Tang Moot Court Competition, adding the national runner-up prize for best brief. Three more students were named national champions of the National Moot Court Competition in January 2026. The School of Law's results for the year list more than twenty mock trial, moot court and arbitration events in which Loyola teams placed or won individual awards.

Undergraduate Research Fellowships

The Office of Undergraduate Research, part of the Center for Engaged Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship (CELTS), runs the Loyola Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (LUROP) and helps students pick a topic, find a mentor and locate funding. Its broadest award is the Provost Fellowship. Any undergraduate in any program or professional school can apply once a faculty mentor has agreed to serve, though students in the hard sciences apply for the summer only. Fellows earn $2,500, paid hourly, and each project has a $1,000 research budget. Summer fellows usually work 10 to 20 hours a week for ten weeks. Every fellow presents at the spring research symposium.

The fellowship list also covers narrower fields. The Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship pairs a student with two faculty mentors from different disciplines. Neuroscience majors and minors can apply for the William and June Pizzi Undergraduate Research Fellowship, which pays $3,500 in hourly wages and adds a $3,500 research budget and $1,000 for travel. Students with little or no research experience can start with the four-week College of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Summer Research Experience after the first or second year.

Where Students Present and Publish

Every Loyola undergraduate may present at the Undergraduate Research and Engagement Symposium. Projects can come from LUROP fellowships, outside programs, courses, service-learning, internships or community partnerships, and students choose a poster, an oral presentation or a learning portfolio. The 2027 symposium will be held in the Mundelein Center for Fine and Performing Arts. CELTS Awards for undergraduate scholarship and for mentors are presented at the Student Excellence Awards and University Convocation.

Loyola Undergraduate Research in Sustainability publishes peer-reviewed research papers, review papers and technical reports by Loyola undergraduates. Its editors ask for clear and complete descriptions of methodology.

Graduate Fellowships and Research Funds

PhD assistantship stipends at Loyola currently run from $28,000 for nine months to $34,000 for twelve, according to the Graduate School's funding page, and come with a tuition scholarship and health insurance. Fellowships carry the same three parts, mostly without service duties. The Arthur J. Schmitt Leadership Scholars Fellowship goes to PhD students in the final stage of the dissertation. In the 2026-2027 call, each department could nominate up to two candidates, and recipients follow a monthly leadership curriculum, present at the Interdisciplinary Graduate Research Symposium or St. Albert's Day, and enter the Three Minute Thesis competition. The Crown Fellowship funds four one-year awards annually for advanced PhD students in English, history, philosophy or theology whose research shows how the humanities contribute to knowledge.

Smaller sums pay research costs. Conference Travel Awards cover up to $750 per academic year in travel, lodging, registration and poster printing for students in Lakeshore and Water Tower programs. A Research Funding Request of up to $500 helps students in historically underfunded disciplines with the expenses of a dissertation, thesis or major research paper. In the Research Mentoring Program, a PhD student working on dissertation research mentors an undergraduate for six to eight weeks in summer, with a $2,000 stipend and up to $500 for research costs; the undergraduate assistant receives $1,500.

Writing Center and Dissertation Submission

The Writing Center works with students and professors at two sites, the Information Commons at Lake Shore and the Corboy Law Center at Water Tower. Writers can meet a tutor face to face, hold a live online session by video or typed chat, or upload a document for written feedback. The Graduate School sends thesis and dissertation writers to the center's graduate tutors for review at any stage of writing or revision.

Manuscripts follow the Formatting Manual for Theses and Dissertations, revised in 2026. Its Editing Help section allows students to hire someone to format or copyedit a thesis or dissertation, provided a hired formatter follows the manual. Grammar and punctuation fall outside the format check. Before final copies, students upload the formatted manuscript, approval sheet, an extra title page and an extra abstract to the ProQuest ETD Administrator for a format check by Graduate School staff. Completed theses and dissertations are kept in Loyola eCommons, the university's open-access repository.

Loyola's manual lets students hire someone to copyedit or format, and a hired formatter must follow its guidelines. Our editors work to those guidelines, checking a thesis or dissertation for grammar, consistency and format before the format check. See our Loyola University Chicago dissertation and thesis editing and Loyola University Chicago essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.

From Our Writing Guides

• How to Write an Argumentative Essay: Beyond For and Against
• ProQuest Readiness: The Final Mechanical Audit
• Literature Synthesis: Moving Beyond the Summary toward Authority