Grants and Writing Resources for the University of Maryland

In March 2026 the University of Maryland's undergraduate moot court team took four of the top six awards in the American Moot Court Association's national Written Brief Competition. Each pair of students wrote an appellate brief of about 30 pages on a hypothetical Supreme Court case that joined an equal protection question to a First Amendment question about a professor's speech. Five of UMD's eight teams placed nationally, and UMD swept the top three places on the petitioner side.

Research as an Undergraduate

Hundreds of undergraduates show posters at Undergraduate Research Day, held each spring by the Office of Undergraduate Research in the Grand Ballroom of Stamp Student Union. There are two poster sessions. Each student presents in one and joins the audience for the other. Projects from any field qualify, whether they grew out of a course, a research program, an internship or work at another institution, as long as the faculty advisor and the office approve them. Advisors can nominate presenters for the OUR Excellence in Research Award, and some nominees talk through their work with project evaluators during the session.

For summer, the office runs SPIRE, in which students design a project and carry it out with a UMD mentor they already work with. The 2027 award is $3,000 for eight weeks at about 20 hours a week. Applicants need 12 credits completed at UMD, excluding AP and IB credit, and every participant presents at the Summer Undergraduate Research Conference.

Prizes and Journals

UMD Libraries give the Library Award for Undergraduate Research for original research that makes strong use of library materials. The 2025 call offered up to four awards of $1,000. One of them is the IDEA award, for research on diversity topics such as race, gender identity, disability and immigration status. Winning essays and projects are added to DRUM, the university's digital repository.

Students founded the Maryland Undergraduate Research Journal in 2022. They still run it, with faculty in supporting roles, and it publishes undergraduate research from many disciplines once a year.

Fellowships and Graduate Awards

Each year the Graduate School awards about 40 Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowships and one Lee Thornton Fellowship, which goes to a dissertation that serves the public good. For a fall 2027 or spring 2028 semester, each fellow receives a $15,000 stipend, a Candidacy Tuition Award for dissertation credits, a credit for mandatory fees and reimbursement for health insurance. Each PhD program can nominate up to two candidates in the late stages of writing.

Doctoral students at mid-career, just before, during or just after candidacy, can be nominated for the Graduate School Summer Research Fellowship. In the 2027 round it pays $5,000, half from the Graduate School and half from the nominating program. Two travel grants help presenters get to conferences. The International Conference Student Support Award pays up to $500 of registration at a conference outside the U.S., and the Jacob K. Goldhaber Travel Grant matches money already secured from another source. A student can receive each one once.

The Charles A. Caramello Distinguished Dissertation Award carries a $1,000 honorarium, with up to four awards a year in four broad fields, and the university may put its recipients forward for the CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award. The Three Minute Thesis competition asks graduate students to explain their research to a general audience in three minutes. Twenty students advance to the final round of the 2027 competition.

Writing Centers and Thesis Filing

Undergraduates book sessions at the UMD Writing Center in 1205 Tawes Hall, face to face or live online, or send a draft for written feedback in about 24 hours. Graduate students and postdocs go to the Graduate School's Center for Writing & Oral Communication, where Writing Fellows hold consultations and weekly write-ins and help with fellowship and grant applications. Its Dissertation Success Support Program meets for an hour each week over a semester.

International graduate students can send papers of up to 30 double-spaced pages to English Editing for International Graduate Students, a free service staffed by volunteer editors. Students who use it must tell their advisor or director of graduate studies about the help.

Finished theses and dissertations go in through ProQuest. The Office of the Registrar checks each one against the ETD Style Guide and then sends it to ProQuest and to DRUM, the open-access Digital Repository at the University of Maryland. The style guide says students are free to hire an editing service, though the Graduate School recommends none in particular, and that responsibility for the language, style and grammar rests with the author. The filing page has Word and LaTeX templates.

UMD leaves the choice of an editing service to the student, and our editors can give a thesis, dissertation or course paper a final edit for grammar, consistency and format before the Registrar's review. See our University of Maryland dissertation and thesis editing and University of Maryland essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.

From Our Writing Guides

• How to Write an Argumentative Essay: Beyond For and Against
• Writing the Abstract and Title: First Impressions Matter
• ProQuest Readiness: The Final Mechanical Audit