Grants and Writing Resources for The University of Hong Kong

The HKU Research Postgraduate Symposium cum Award Presentation Ceremony 2026 on 9 March 2026 drew about 170 research students presenting posters, a year after roughly 140 did so at the 2025 symposium. The top two presenters in each group took home awards. One of them was a PhD student who won a Best Poster Presentation Award.

Presenting Research

The Graduate School's annual symposium is where research postgraduates show their work, and the 2026 edition paired the poster sessions with an award ceremony. Undergraduates have their own route. The Undergraduate Research Fellowship Programme is open to students in the 90th percentile of their programme or with a cumulative GPA of 3.50 or above, usually in the final year, and each fellow completes a dissertation or research paper under an experienced supervisor.

Completion of the fellowship is recorded on the transcript. Where an internship is essential to the study, fellows may be considered for awards supporting local, Mainland or overseas research placements.

Graduate Awards

The Li Ka Shing Prizes go to up to six PhD or MPhil theses each year for academic excellence. Alongside them, the HKU Foundation Award for Outstanding Research Postgraduate Students recognizes up to ten students a year whose theses are of exceptional quality and whose wider academic record stands out.

Two cash awards come earlier in candidature. The HKU Foundation Publication Award for Research Postgraduate Students pays HK$5,000 to each of up to twenty students for an exceptional journal article tied to their thesis area. The HKU Foundation First Year Excellent PhD Award gives a certificate and HK$5,000 to up to fifteen PhD students who performed strongly during probation.

Writing Prizes

The School of English lists its prizes and scholarships in one place. Poets should look at the Maisie Choa English Poetry Prize, judged on coursework for English poetry courses and open to English Studies majors; Creative Writing work counts when it's poetry. Literature prizes for final-year students include the Annie Wong Prize in English Literature and the Ellis Bell Prize in English Literature and Comparative Literature.

Student Journals and Theses

The Hong Kong Journal of Legal Studies calls itself the oldest student-run law journal in Hong Kong. It began in 1994 as the Hong Kong Student Law Review and takes submissions from students and early-career researchers on the law of Hong Kong and Greater China.

Graduates' theses are deposited in HKU Theses Online on the HKU Scholars Hub, which holds more than 34,000 items. Under the university's open access policy for theses, students keep copyright and grant HKU a non-exclusive licence for non-commercial use.

Writing Support

The Centre for Applied English Studies runs Communication Support Services for all UGC-funded undergraduate and postgraduate students. Its Writing Centre offers one-to-one consultations booked online. Research students get a separate allowance: through Graduate Student Academic Writing Support, each PhD and MPhil student has four hours of free one-on-one consultation with CAES consultants during candidature, on a submitted piece of up to 15 pages.

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 Hong Kong dissertation and thesis editing and University of Hong Kong essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.