Grants and Writing Resources for University of California, Los Angeles

A Physiological Science graduate student won the 2026 UCLA Grad Slam and its $5,000 first prize with a three-minute talk on sleep disruptions in myotonic dystrophy. The win earned him a place at the UC Grad Slam in Sacramento. Undergraduate writers have their own record. The English Department's 2025 winners list names seven recipients of the 2024–25 Mary Alice Fortin Foundation Creative Writing Award alone.

Graduate Fellowships and Grants

The Graduate Division's continuing-student awards share one application form. The Graduate Research Mentorship Program pays $30,000 plus standard tuition and fees to first- through third-year doctoral students in the arts, humanities, social sciences, public health, nursing, and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability who haven't yet advanced to candidacy. Its summer counterpart, the Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Program, pays up to $6,000 for a summer of work with a faculty mentor on a paper meant for a conference or journal.

PhD, DEnv, and DMA students can draw on a Doctoral Travel Grant of up to $1,000 in total, usable through the seventh year of the program. It covers conference presentations, off-campus research, and professional development.

Writing Prizes

The English Department lists its scholarships and prizes with published amounts. The Falling Leaves Award gives $2,000 to a junior in English creative writing for fiction, and the David Wong Louie Memorial Creative Writing Prize gives $1,000 for a short story or creative essay. The Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Award is open to any UCLA student, at $1,000 for first place and $600 for second. Critical writing counts as well. The winner of the department's essay contest for English majors advances to the university-wide awards.

Writing Centers

The Kwame J. Granderson Undergraduate Writing Center offers free one-on-one appointments for course papers, capstone projects, senior theses, and application materials. It has locations in Powell Library, Kaplan Hall, Rieber Hall, and Kerckhoff Hall.

Graduate and professional students use the Graduate Writing Center, which offers free 50-minute consultations, workshops, and support for master's thesis and capstone writers. It also runs writing groups, including Mindful Writing Sessions on Zoom. In summer 2026 its six-week Dissertation Boot Camp ran in two tracks, one for humanities and arts and one for qualitative social sciences, and participants brought 5 to 10 new pages to each session after the first.

Where Theses Are Published

UCLA master's theses and doctoral dissertations appear open access in the UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations series on eScholarship, the UC system's publishing platform. For articles, the Library's Open Access & Publishing page explains that UC agreements with journal publishers often cover open access fees for UC authors. UC affiliates can also start an open access journal on eScholarship at no cost.

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 University of California, Los Angeles dissertation and thesis editing page, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.