Grants and Writing Resources for University of California, Berkeley
In February 2026 a senior majoring in Molecular and Cell Biology and Business Administration was named a Churchill Scholar, Berkeley's first in a decade, with a year of master's study at Churchill College, Cambridge ahead. The 2025-2026 scholarships wrap-up also names the year's Goldwater Scholars.
Research Prizes and Undergraduate Funding
The library has run the Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research since 2003. It rewards course-based projects built on serious use of the library's collections, and lower- and upper-division entries are judged separately, at $950 and $1,200. Winners and honorable mentions go into eScholarship, the University of California's open access publishing platform.
For summer work, SURF L&S gives juniors and seniors in Letters & Science a $5,000 stipend for seven weeks of full-time research with a faculty mentor. Undergraduates with financial need can apply to be Haas Scholars for their final year: twenty a year receive up to $14,800 for an independent research or creative project that serves as the basis for a senior or honors thesis, and they present it at a program conference.
Student Journals
The Berkeley Undergraduate Journal publishes undergraduate research in the humanities and social sciences once a year, and its eScholarship archive goes back to 2008. It's open access on eScholarship. Volume 40 came out in 2026.
Writing Help for Undergraduates
The Student Learning Center's Writing Program offers drop-in, appointment and weekly tutoring, plus peer-led workshops. Its writing conferences are student-initiated.
Dissertation Support
Graduate students can book one-on-one consultations at the Graduate Division's Graduate Writing Center, which covers academic and grant writing, dissertation writing and preparing articles for publication. Its workshop list includes Writing Abstracts and Writing the Dissertation: Strategies and Pitfalls. A remote writing boot camp runs on Zoom during RRR Week.
Advanced doctoral students in the arts, humanities and humanistic social sciences who have reached candidacy and have not held the grant before can apply for a Summer Dissertation Writing Grant of $6,000, with $2,000 more for student parents; recipients commit to at least two summer months of full-time writing and a formal dissertation-writing group.
Where Theses Are Published
Berkeley dissertations appear in the open-access UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations series on eScholarship, the University of California's publishing platform.
When a paper, thesis, or dissertation is ready for a final edit, our editors can help. See our University of California, Berkeley dissertation and thesis editing and University of California, Berkeley 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 the University of California, Berkeley, and your faculty may endorse our services individually. We look forward to helping you bring your Berkeley writing to its strongest, submission-ready form.