The Global Undergraduate Awards

Our new 2024 Season is Open

The Global Undergraduate Awards is the world’s leading undergraduate awards programme which recognises top undergraduate work, shares this work with a global audience and connects students across cultures and disciplines.

Our values are innovation, collaboration, ambition, impartiality and inclusiveness. We believe in empowering students, helping them to recognise the potential their undergraduate work can have in making real change. We wish to connect the world’s brightest students and graduates early in their career to give them the confidence to acknowledge and harness their talents to build a brighter future. Fundamentally, we celebrate the passion and excellence of undergraduate students in their chosen field, and help them to explore how that passion can be deployed in making the world a better place for all.

The Undergraduate Library

The Undergraduate Library is an open access library dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of all award-winning entries of The Global Undergraduate Awards Programme.

All Highly Commended Entrants, Regional Winners and Global Winners are eligible to have their winning entry archived within library.

The Annual GUA Global Summit

The annual UA Global Summit is a unique three-day event for undergraduate students and academics.

The Global Undergraduate Summit is built around the central tenet of sharing information, knowledge and ideas, while making long-standing interdisciplinary and international connections and friendships.

The UA Numbers

The Global Undergraduate Awards is the world’s leading academic awards programme, open to all undergraduate students in almost every academic discipline and attracting submissions from hundreds of universities on every continent.

It was an amazing few days getting to know other winners from a range of different categories and countries. The opportunity to present my research and speak with so many brilliant minds is incomparable. I can’t wait to see what everyone achieves in the future.

The prize, the medal is a great bonus to have but I think more important are the connections that we have made, and the ideas that we have shared. It's an unbelievable experience.

It’s nice to have a platform where undergraduate work is recognised as being as revolutionary and groundbreaking as the stuff that’s produced at postgraduate level.

The research that we conduct is most often impacted by our intimate personal identities and so when you’re sharing your research you are sharing a part of yourself, your life, your identity, and your community with each other.

Alumni Spotlight 2025 Global Winner interviews

Hear from three of our 2025 winners about the inspiration behind their award winning papers and why they think other students should apply for The Global Undergraduate Awards.

GUA Alumni Spotlight

We caught up with three of our 2025 winners about what it meant for them to be recognised as Global Winners, their papers and plans for the future.

GUA Alumni – Emma Brain

When securing employment doesn’t go as you planned

The Global Undergraduate Awards celebrate original and creative thinking among students, and the need for such critical thinking has never been greater.

One thing that struck me about the essays was the breadth of knowledge and the discipline of structure…I don’t like to use the word brilliant, but they truly were brilliant. Once we were down to the last ten we were wondering how we could separate perfection from perfection.

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