Grants and Writing Resources for Auburn University

Four aerospace engineering students helped lead the Auburn team that ranked first among U.S. teams in NASA's Global Trajectory Optimization Competition, Auburn Engineering reported in March 2026. The team placed 10th of 101 entries worldwide. Over four weeks it planned a spacecraft tour of Altaira, a fictional solar system, using solar sail propulsion and gravity assists to collect as much science from planets and asteroids as the time limit allowed.

Undergraduate Research Funding

Any Auburn undergraduate can compete for an Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Each one carries a stipend and runs from one semester to a full year. The Office of Undergraduate Research and the colleges support more than 100 of these fellowships a year, and proposals come from every college, history and English included.

Honors College students have two more sources. The Auburn Honors Research Support Grant, typically $500 to $1,500, pays for costs such as lab supplies or travel for fieldwork and experiments. It can't serve as a stipend, though it can be combined with an Undergraduate Research Fellowship, and recipients present at the Honors College Exhibition and the Undergraduate Research Symposium. The Honors College Conference Travel Grant gives up to $500 toward registration, economy airfare, mileage, hotel and poster printing for a student presenting at an academic conference.

Symposium, 3MT and AUJUS

Nearly 500 graduate and undergraduate students presented at the 2025 Auburn Research Symposium, and 69 were honored. The student symposium takes oral presentations, posters and creative scholarship. Its award criteria set poster and oral divisions in STEM and in social science and creative scholarship in design, arts and humanities. University-wide winners receive $500, $250 and $100 at the graduate level and $125, $75 and $50 at the undergraduate level. Each college also names a top poster and a top oral presentation.

The Graduate School's Three Minute Thesis sends the top ten from its preliminary rounds to a university-wide final. In 2026 the winner receives $500, and the runner-up and People's Choice $250 each. Auburn's winner can go on to regional 3MT competitions.

Undergraduates in any discipline can publish in AUJUS, the Auburn University Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship, run jointly by the Office of Undergraduate Research and the Office of University Writing. It takes two kinds of submission. A Research Highlight summarizes a project in 1,000 words or fewer for a general, educated reader. A Research Article runs to about 10 double-spaced pages and needs a faculty sponsorship form. Reviewers with matching expertise read selected work, and review typically takes 4 to 12 weeks.

Graduate Fellowships and Dissertation Prizes

College deans nominate incoming doctoral and terminal professional students for the Presidential Graduate Research Fellowship. It combines a $15,000 Presidential Fellowship, a Dean's Fellowship of at least $7,000 and a research assistantship stipend of at least $15,000, for a minimum of $37,000 a year plus a tuition waiver. Funding is guaranteed for up to three years. Fellows hold a graduate research assistantship and complete a Graduate School professional development activity each semester.

Most Graduate School awards begin with a nomination and are presented at a ceremony each April. Each college may put forward up to three students for the $500 Distinguished Dissertation Awards and the $250 Master's Thesis Awards, with eligible disciplines alternating between even and odd years. Departments nominate one doctoral student each for the $2,000 Merriwether Fellowship. The Williams Graduate Awards, $1,000 each, are open to degree-seeking students with at least a 3.0 GPA, and the Graduate Student Council administers the Frank Sturm Memorial Fellowship. The Sturm fellowship gives one student $1,000 a year to attend an off-campus colloquium, seminar or conference. Applicants must be pursuing the highest graduate degree their department offers and show leadership through campus or community involvement, regardless of GPA. Preference goes to students in multidisciplinary research or teaching projects and to those planning to attend an interdisciplinary conference.

Students aiming at national competitions can book an appointment with the Honors College's Office of National Prestigious Scholarships, which works with Auburn students from every discipline. Its advisers help a student pick the awards that fit and prepare the application materials. The list runs from the Truman, Goldwater and Boren scholarships to the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships, and the Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Poetry Prize and The Auburn Circle

Any Auburn student can submit a poem for the Robert Hughes Mount, Jr. Poetry Prize, a $100 prize for the best poem entered. The English department also gives undergraduate scholarships of $200 to $4,000. Two of them go to juniors with strong academic records in the writing majors: the Creative Writing Scholarship and the Professional and Public Writing Scholarship. Some department awards require an application through AUSOM, the Auburn University Scholarship Opportunity Manager.

Writers, artists, photographers and designers at Auburn publish in The Auburn Circle, the university's literary and arts magazine, which comes out once in the fall and once in the spring. The Department of English houses Southern Humanities Review, a literary quarterly of fiction, poetry and essays published since 1967. In 2022 Auburn reported that creative writing master's students served as its assistant editors as part of their assistantships, and that the journal offered internships to undergraduates.

Writing Consultations and AUETD

The Miller Writing Center gives free one-on-one appointments to current students and faculty, either live in RBD Library or on Zoom, for up to 50 minutes. A writer can also upload a project and get written feedback from a consultant that day, with a summary letter and comments in the text. Some of the peer consultants are graduate students.

University Writing runs graduate programs as well. The Graduate Research & Writing Studio, sponsored with Auburn Libraries, is a weekly writing retreat with a research librarian and a graduate writing consultant available. WriteFest is a four-session series for students working on a long writing project. Graduate Writing Partners pairs a student with a graduate writing consultant for two hours of standing appointments each week for a full semester, and applicants need a recommendation from an advisor or professor.

The ETD guide gives the advisory committee primary responsibility for judging a thesis or dissertation, and the Graduate School gives each dissertation a format check. Word templates and a LaTeX template are available. The approved final PDF goes into AUETD, which holds every thesis and dissertation defended at Auburn since fall 2005 and is free to read online. A $50 publication processing fee goes on the student's Bursar bill.

Our editors give Auburn theses, dissertations and term papers a final edit for grammar, consistency and Graduate School format. See our Auburn University dissertation and thesis editing and Auburn University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.

From Our Writing Guides

• How to Write an Analytical Essay: Analysis vs. Interpretation
• The Literature Review: Avoiding Intellectual Overwhelm
• The Results Chapter: Presenting Data with Forensic Clarity