Grants and Writing Resources for Northwestern University

A member of Northwestern's class of 2025 was named a 2026 Rhodes Scholar, and a Northwestern senior earned a Marshall Scholarship, according to the Office of Fellowships news list. The 2026 list is longer. Two students were named Goldwater Scholars, a senior was chosen as a Schwarzman Scholar, and the university marked 22 years as a top Fulbright producer.

Research Funding for Undergraduates

The Office of Undergraduate Research funds independent research and creative projects. A Summer Undergraduate Research Grant pays a $4,000 stipend for eight weeks of full-time work under faculty supervision, plus up to half of airfare for international travel. During the school year, the Academic Year Undergraduate Research Grant provides $1,000, and juniors can compete for the $12,500 Circumnavigator Grant for a summer of international travel and research.

Undergraduates accepted to present at a conference or juried exhibition can apply for a Conference Travel Grant. It covers half of costs such as conference fees and airfare, up to $500, and students can receive one per academic year.

Presenting and Publishing

Each spring the Undergraduate Research & Arts Exposition fills Norris with poster sessions and themed panels of eight- to ten-minute talks led by faculty moderators. Its companion Creative Arts Festival at the Wirtz Center is a juried show of creative writing, film, visual art and performance.

Students can submit to NURJ, the Northwestern Undergraduate Research Journal, which the Office of Undergraduate Research lists as a place to publish. Finished work can also go into Arch, the library's open access repository for Northwestern research and scholarship, where depositors log in with a NetID.

Writing Prizes

The English department's Annual Writing Competition awards cash prizes from $50 to $500, and students from every school are encouraged to enter. Any undergraduate can submit fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction or audio/visual work, or a critical or research essay. There are also categories for experimental critical forms and for papers from English 300 and the English first-year seminar.

Graduate writers have the Beiling Wu Prize in Writing, given by The Graduate School for the best critical essay on literature or literary culture written by a first-year doctoral or MFA student. The prize adds $1,000 to the winner's stipend.

Graduate Fellowships and Grants

The Graduate School calls its Presidential Fellowship its most prestigious award: 24 months of stipend and tuition, plus a $1,000 research award and up to $1,000 a year in travel funds, with membership in the Society of Fellows. Among other internal awards, the Summer Language Grant gives PhD students up to $2,000 for language training their dissertation research requires, and the Pre-doctoral Research Summer Institute offers 18 second- and third-year humanities and social science PhD students up to $4,000 in summer research funding.

In historically underfunded fields, PhD and MFA students can apply for a Graduate Research Grant of up to $3,000 across their graduate careers. Eligible areas include humanities and social science projects in Weinberg along with the School of Music, among others. The grant pays for research travel and materials that aren't available locally.

Writing Support

The Writing Place offers peer writing consultations in the Main Library and online, at any stage from brainstorming to revision. Consultants act as attentive readers of your draft.

Graduate students, faculty and staff use the Graduate Writing Place at 555 Clark Street, where PhD candidates serving as Graduate Writing Fellows consult on manuscripts and dissertation chapters. PhD students past coursework can join weekly interdisciplinary writing groups of five or six members. Advanced students who have passed their proposal can apply for a two-week Dissertation Boot Camp, and three-hour writing retreats run through the year in person or on Zoom.

If you'd like an editor's eye on a thesis chapter or a research paper before it goes out, we can help. See our Northwestern University dissertation and thesis editing and Northwestern University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.