Grants and Writing Resources for Clemson University

Clemson now counts 69 Goldwater Scholars. The three added in April 2026 are Honors students: two juniors in chemical engineering and physics and a sophomore in chemistry, selected from more than 5,000 applicants nationwide. In May the university reported six Fulbright English Teaching Assistant awards for 2026–27, five to May graduates and one to an alumna. It was the second year in a row that Clemson students and alumni earned six.

Creative Inquiry and the Poster Forum

Clemson organizes much of its undergraduate research as team projects in Creative Inquiry + Undergraduate Research. About 4,500 undergraduates in every discipline work on roughly 400 team projects a year, mentored by faculty, postdocs and graduate students. Each spring the program holds Focus on Creative Inquiry, a three-day poster forum at the Watt Center for a general audience. Every CI project presents at least once every two years. The 2026 forum showed 358 posters with 1,495 student co-authors, and awards went to printed posters, digital posters and a Popular Poster.

Graduate students join undergraduates at the Clemson Student Research Forum, held alongside the poster forum for any student doing mentored research. Teams working on fruit and vegetable crops, rural economic development or community and business development can apply for the Carr Family Endowment, which gives a CI team $4,000 for one year.

Fellowships and Graduate Funding

The Office of Major Fellowships advises students and alumni on nationally competitive scholarships, grants and fellowships at any stage of an undergraduate or graduate degree, and after graduation.

For graduate students, Clemson's internal fellowships are awarded competitively on faculty nomination, and departments, colleges and centers manage them. Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering offers up to six GAANN fellowships a year, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, with stipends of up to $34,000 a year based on financial need and two mentored teaching experiences. The School of Computing keeps a list of PhD fellowships from industry and federal sponsors, with notes on which ones need an adviser's nomination.

Graduate Student Government administers Graduate Travel Grants, which reimburse travel to conferences, workshops and field experiences. Any current graduate student may apply, up to three grants in an academic year. The Graduate School's annual awards include the Outstanding Graduate Researcher Award and the Frankie O. Felder Graduate Student Award of Excellence.

Thesis Talks and Student Magazines

The Graduate School's Three Minute Thesis competition asks graduate researchers to explain a thesis to non-specialists in three minutes. Doctoral candidates and other graduate students compete in separate groups. Each group has a preliminary round and finals, with cash prizes for first and second place, and one participant receives a People's Choice Award.

Undergraduates produce Decipher, an annual magazine about Creative Inquiry projects. Students in the Popular Science Journalism CI course write Tigra Scientifica, a semesterly magazine that explains primary scientific research to general readers. The Clemson Chronicle, the university's twice-yearly literary magazine of prose, poetry, features, art and photography, has issues archived in Clemson OPEN back to 1897.

The Writing Lab and Manuscript Review

The Writing Lab in 301 Cooper Library works with writers in any discipline and at any level. Its trained peer consultants help with brainstorming, drafting and revision. Appointments run 30 minutes or an hour, face to face or on Zoom, and emailed feedback covers up to eight pages in 45 minutes. Writers may book two a week. Graduate students register through Grad 360 for writing retreats, including Dissertation Accelerators and write-ins, and for seminars on publication and grant writing.

Theses and dissertations are uploaded as PDFs to the Clemson OPEN ETD portal, described on the Graduate School's theses and dissertations pages, and many need at least one round of revisions. According to the ETD FAQs, Manuscript Review checks that the file is complete and formatted for electronic publication, and the review does not include proofreading. The student and committee are responsible for the document's quality and content. The Graduate School provides a list of editors, proofreaders, typists and formatters who have expressed interest in offering thesis and dissertation support to Clemson graduate students. Approved work is published open access in Clemson OPEN; under an embargo, only the metadata and abstract are public.

Clemson's Graduate School holds the student and committee responsible for a manuscript's quality, and our editors can give a Clemson thesis, dissertation or course paper a final edit for grammar, consistency and format before it is submitted. See our Clemson University dissertation and thesis editing and Clemson University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.

From Our Writing Guides

• How to Write an Expository Essay: Reveal the Proof
• Methodology Chapter Secrets: Building the Architecture of Your Argument
• The Results Chapter: Presenting Data with Forensic Clarity