Grants and Writing Resources for the University of Alberta

Eighty-three UAlberta graduate students won federal Canada Graduate Research Scholarships under the Canada Research Training Awards Suite, the university announced in October 2026. Sixty master's students received one-year awards of $27,000. The other 23 are doctoral students, each funded at $40,000 a year for three years.

Undergraduate Research Funding

The Undergraduate Research Initiative (URI) puts up to 17 funding opportunities behind one streamlined application. Its core award, the URI Stipend, pays $7,500 for a project term of four to 12 months and is open in all disciplines to students in a first undergraduate degree who have not held a URI Stipend before. Named stipends at the same value go to first-year students, to First Nations, Métis and Inuit students, and to projects in Ukrainian studies, campus sustainability or with a focus on China. Summer studentships, the Alberta Innovates Summer Research Studentship among them, pay $1,875 a month for two to four months.

The 2026 competition drew 588 applications and made 237 offers, 40 percent overall. Tri-Agency Undergraduate Student Research Awards are worth at least $8,400 for 16 weeks, including a supervisor or department top-up of $2,400 or more. At present the CIHR and SSHRC awards are restricted to Black student researchers.

Where Undergraduates Present and Publish

More than 150 students presented at the Festival of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (FURCA) in March 2026, in poster and oral sessions at University Commons. Judges watch the presentations through the week and hand out awards at a closing reception. The 2026 award list named 12 Outstanding Communication awards, and two of its awards went to first- and second-year students for early-career research.

URI manages Spectrum, an undergraduate research journal whose issue No. 17 appeared in August 2026 with articles on Maximilian I's propaganda and on tick-borne encephalitis virus. URI's publishing resources list student journals by field, including Constellations in history and classics, Discursus in philosophy, Eureka for Faculty of Science research and Invoke in sociology. Economics Student Inquiry and Compass, an anthropology journal, take work from graduate students as well.

Graduate Funding and Travel Awards

Starting in fall 2025, the U of A committed to minimum guaranteed funding of $100,000 over four years for PhD students in years one to four, with at least $25,000 in the first year. The money can come from any combination of sources paid through the university. Part-time students, working professionals and sponsored students already receiving $25,000 a year or more are excluded.

Doctoral students who have finished at least one year of graduate study can hold an Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship, with a stipend of $45,000 a year. Each year three Dorothy J Killam Memorial Graduate Prizes of $5,000 go to the most outstanding Killam scholars. Full-time doctoral students who hold a Vanier, CGS-D, SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship or Trudeau Foundation scholarship, among other listed awards, are considered automatically for the President's Doctoral Prize of Distinction, a top-up that takes no application.

For conference and research travel, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (GPS) offers a Graduate Student Travel Award of up to $2,000. It pays toward presenting a paper or poster, exhibiting work or joining a panel, or toward a research trip that develops the student's research. Each student can receive one during the graduate program. The award arrives by direct deposit, and no receipts are required.

Writing Help

Appointments and workshops at the Writing and Learning Centre in Cameron Library are free for current students, from first-year coursework through ABD. Graduate students can get feedback from a graduate writing advisor on course papers, literature reviews, theses, articles for publication and funding proposals. Writing advisors and peer tutors go over strengths and areas to improve. Students can book up to one hour a week, to a limit of 10 hours a semester.

Graduate students from any discipline can join the Centre's weekly writing groups: a Writing Hour that meets in Rutherford Library and online, and virtual writing cafés held three times a week. Each session opens with a short check-in, and most of the time goes to working together.

Thesis Submission and Copy Editing

GPS publishes the thesis requirements, with minimum formatting rules for chapter and paper-based theses and separate rules for digital, artistic, performance-based and mixed-format work. A thesis that misses them may be rejected. The student uploads one PDF/A file through Thesis Deposit after sending GPS the non-exclusive licence, any copyright permission letters and the Thesis Approval/Program Completion form. Approved theses enter the U of A Libraries collection and Library and Archives Canada's Theses Canada Portal, and they are published in the Education and Research Archive (ERA), which is moving to Scholaris, a Canadian shared institutional repository service.

The Writing and Learning Centre runs an academic copy-editing service for final-stage documents such as theses, articles for publication and funding proposals, at a subsidized $2.50 per double-spaced page for current students and postdoctoral scholars. Its editors look for grammatical and punctuation errors, logical and conceptual inconsistencies and unclear communication, and they address content only where it affects clarity. The author keeps autonomy over the work and responsibility for the final version. The service takes no course papers, assignments or other graded work, and compliance with the Student Academic Integrity Policy stays with the writer.

Once a thesis, journal article or funding proposal reaches its final stage, our editors can check it for grammar, consistency and format, and the content and the final decisions stay with the author. See our University of Alberta dissertation and thesis editing and University of Alberta essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.

From Our Writing Guides

• From Dissertation to Publication: The Final Scholarly Synthesis
• Literature Synthesis: Moving Beyond the Summary toward Authority
• How to Write a Critical Essay: Mastering Academic Critique