Grants and Writing Resources for the University of California, Santa Cruz
The storyboards of Buffalo Bill's lair from The Silence of the Lambs in the Academy Museum's exhibition The Horror Show carry wall text by a UC Santa Cruz Ph.D. student in film and digital media, who rewrote it dozens of times over more than four months. As the Moving Image Lab's 2026 curatorial and exhibitions fellow, the student also wrote exhibition and publication texts and helped curate footage for a darkened hallway. The show drew nearly 8,000 visitors in its opening weekend.
Prizes for Theses and Projects
Finished undergraduate work competes in three tiers. Ten theses or projects from each academic division receive Deans' Undergraduate Awards, fifty in all, worth $100 each. The top three in every division go on to the Chancellor's Undergraduate Awards and an additional $500.
From those fifteen, one project wins the Steck Award: $2,000 for the student or team and $1,000 for the mentor. The winning work is bound, and one copy goes to the UCSC Library. Entries need a letter from a UCSC-affiliated mentor, an abstract and the completed thesis, project or video performance.
Paying for Research
The Financial Aid and Scholarships Office administers the Koret Research Scholarship, which gave each student selected for a research project $3,000 in the 2026-27 cycle and supports up to 50 students a year. The mentor can be a faculty member, a graduate student, a postdoc or a researcher with a CruzID. The work has to sit outside regular coursework, and scholars present it at the Koret Slam.
Other grants come from the divisions, departments and residential colleges. The Office of Undergraduate Research keeps links to them on its funding opportunities page.
Student Magazines and Journals
The Creative Writing Program lists a dozen student publications. Chinquapin, the longest-running student-run literary magazine at UCSC, prints poetry, fiction, prose, photography and visual art once a year and gives students a place to learn editing, graphic design and publishing. EyeCandy is an annual student-run journal of critical writing on film and digital media. Gaia covers the environment, and City on a Hill Press is the weekly student newspaper.
Dissertation Fellowships, Writing Help and Filing
The Graduate Division's Presidential Dissertation-Year Fellowship and Chancellor's Dissertation-Year Fellowship go to continuing doctoral students who advanced to candidacy a year before nomination and can finish the dissertation within the fellowship year. Nominees submit a letter of application of two pages or fewer, and the faculty adviser sends a letter on the student's work. Quarterly dissertation fellowships, for one, two or three quarters, are distributed by each division's doctoral enrollment.
Peer Writing Assistants at the Writing Center work with undergraduate and graduate students, and sessions are booked online.
Under the graduate handbook, a master's thesis must be "a professionally finished work in format, style, spelling and appearance," and its title page is signed by the committee. Dissertations follow the format set by the Graduate Council and are submitted electronically through the ProQuest ETD Administrator site.
For a thesis that has to meet that standard of format, style and spelling, our editors can provide a final edit. See our UC Santa Cruz dissertation and thesis editing and UC Santa Cruz 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, Santa Cruz, and your faculty may endorse our services individually. We look forward to helping you bring your UC Santa Cruz writing to its strongest, submission-ready form.