Grants and Writing Resources for Waseda University

At the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Cyborg and Bionic Systems that October, three third-year doctoral students from Waseda's Graduate School of Information, Production and Systems were finalists for the Best Cyborg Award. Six days earlier another third-year doctoral student in the same school took a Best Presentation Award at JSRMR2025.

Doctoral Fellowships

W-SPRING, the Waseda University Open Innovation Ecosystem Program for Pioneering Research, funds doctoral students for up to three years, through the third year of the doctoral program. Waseda runs it under JST's SPRING scheme, which selected the university in 2021. Category 1 fellows receive living expenses of 2.4 million or 2.2 million yen a year plus 500,000 yen for research. Category 2, for international students, carries the 500,000-yen research allowance. The program says its figures are tentative and that from AY2027 living-expense support will be limited to Japanese students and others who meet the eligibility rules.

Travel and Conference Grants

Waseda's Overseas Research Travel Grant Program for Upper-level Undergraduate and Graduate Students can support a student twice each fiscal year, once between April and September and once between October and March. It pays up to 110,000 yen toward travel, mainly airfare, with lodging also eligible when the airfare costs less, plus up to 55,000 yen toward the registration fee for an international academic conference. Upper-level undergraduates and students in master's, professional degree and doctoral programs qualify, along with students on leave to study abroad, and the grant also covers study abroad, unpaid internships, fieldwork and international consortia.

Individual graduate schools add their own funds. The Graduate School of Economics pays up to 70,000 yen per conference through its Grant-in-aid for Students' Researches, for students presenting at Science Council of Japan societies or international meetings, and gives doctoral students partial subsidies for membership and paper submission fees.

Awards

The university's highest student honor is the Ono Azusa Memorial Award, given for outstanding achievement in academics, the arts and sports, with a special award since 1994 for work outside those fields. Recipients get a gold-plated silver medal. Undergraduate and graduate winners for the 2025 academic year received theirs at the March 2026 degree ceremonies.

Publishing

Through the library's Read & Publish agreements, members of the university can have article processing charges waived or discounted in eligible journals from Cambridge, Elsevier, Oxford, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Most waivers have a cap.

Writing Support

Any Waseda student can book free, unlimited 45-minute sessions at the Writing Center, in Japanese or English, on campus or by video call. Tutors read reports, graduation theses and study-abroad applications at any stage from planning to final draft. First-year students can also take the Global Education Center's seven-week on-demand Academic Writing Course in Japanese.

At the library, graduate students working as Library Learning Assistants help other students with their work. Reference desks at each branch take research questions.

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

From Our Writing Guides

• From Dissertation to Publication: The Final Scholarly Synthesis
• ESL Academic Writing: Overcoming Common Grammar Habits
• Treating the Personal Statement as a Scholarly Defense