Grants and Writing Resources for Princeton University
In fall 2025, two Princeton seniors were named 2026 Rhodes Scholars. A molecular biology major chosen for Jordan wrote a senior thesis that applies machine learning to global clinical data on the gut microbiome and colorectal cancer, and he'll start two master's programs in cancer science and health services at Oxford. The other is a politics major and first-generation student who transferred from Northern Virginia Community College after three years as a C-130 crew chief in the U.S. Air Force. He'll read for an MPhil in international relations.
Presenting Research
Princeton Research Day, Undergraduate Edition is a yearly poster event, and the 2026 event was held at the Princeton University Art Museum on February 20. Work from all four divisions is welcome, creative projects included, and presentations compete for awards and cash prizes chosen by judges and by the public. Anyone can attend.
Money for Theses and Conferences
The Office of Undergraduate Research administers senior thesis research funds from the Office of the Dean of the College. Every application goes through SAFE, the Student Activities Funding Engine, and needs evaluations from both the faculty adviser and the director of undergraduate studies; B.S.E. students apply to the engineering school's own thesis funds. Budgets must be itemized. Food is covered up to $35 a day and surveys up to $3,000, and students on financial aid who need to be on campus over the summer can receive a stipend of up to $800 a week for as many as nine weeks.
The Undergraduate Fund for Academic Conferences awards $500 to $750 to enrolled undergraduates attending a conference or workshop tied to their independent work, with priority for students presenting a paper, talk or poster. Virtual meetings count. A student can receive one award per 12-month period.
Fellowships for Ph.D. Students
The Graduate School's most prestigious fellowship is the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, which supports the final year of study for one Ph.D. student in each division. The 2026 Jacobus Fellows work in history, English, computer science, and applied and computational mathematics. Each spring, departments and programs nominate students for the Graduate School's honorific fellowships, which also include the Harold W. Dodds Fellowship, the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Fellowships and the Wallace Memorial Fellowships in Engineering.
For conference travel, the Dean's Fund for Scholarly Travel gives up to $600 a year to Ph.D. students, from the third year of regular enrollment through the first year of Dissertation Completion Enrollment, who've been invited to present sole-authored work. Humanities and social science students use one SAFE application to request summer support for language study and research abroad from programs such as the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and American Studies.
Prizes, Journals and the Thesis Archive
The Lewis Center for the Arts lists twelve creative writing awards, including the Edmund Keeley Literary Translation Award and the Distinguished Creative Writing Thesis Award, and seven of them were presented at its 2026 Class Day celebration. Writing Center Fellows edit Tortoise: A Journal of Writing Pedagogy, an annual that prints excerpts of undergraduate and graduate writing from any discipline alongside a reflection by the writer and an editor's commentary; its latest issue is Spring 2026. The Office of Undergraduate Research invited submissions for the Spring 2026 edition of PURJ, the Princeton Undergraduate Research Journal, whose peer review is led by Princeton undergraduates and faculty.
Senior theses go to the University Archives at Mudd Library, the official repository since 1924. Ph.D. dissertations from 2011 on are free to read in DataSpace, and so are master's theses from 2022 on.
Help With Writing
The Writing Center offers free one-on-one conferences to undergraduate and graduate students, 50 minutes as standard, plus 50- or 80-minute Research Writing conferences for graduate work such as grant proposals and dissertation chapters. Fellows don't proofread. They'll work on a draft at any stage, from brainstorming a thesis to restructuring an argument.
Dissertation Boot Camps, run by the Writing Program with the Graduate School about four times a year, put a small cohort through a week of scheduled writing sessions and debriefs; there's no tuition, though a $50 deposit is charged to anyone who doesn't meet the attendance requirements. Graduate students in the humanities and social sciences who want to turn a seminar paper or thesis into an article can take WRI 504: Write to Publish in the Social Sciences and Humanities. It ends with a manuscript ready to submit.
When your draft is close and you want a careful last read, our editors are available. See our Princeton University dissertation and thesis editing and Princeton University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.
From Our Writing Guides
Compiled by James Peterson Brown, PhD, Managing Editor of Editors For Students. Links checked October 2026.
Editors For Students is an independent editorial service and is not affiliated with Princeton University, and your faculty may endorse our services individually. We look forward to helping you bring your Princeton writing to its strongest, submission-ready form.