Grants and Writing Resources for Dakota State University
A Dakota State team won the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, the university reported in May 2026, finishing ahead of the University of Virginia and Western Washington University. All ten teams at nationals were regional winners, and the event ran two days of head-to-head defense against active attacks, with eight DSU students competing and four more as alternates. In November 2025, two DSU students were named RSAC Security Scholars for the RSAC 2026 Conference in San Francisco: a master's student in computer science and a cyber operations undergraduate headed for the master's in cyber defense.
Research Week and the Symposium
The 2026 Research Week ran in March alongside the annual Doctoral Residency and led into DakotaCon. On the Thursday, afternoon classes were suspended so faculty could bring students to the Research Symposium in the Beacom Collaboration Space. The symposium is open to every student regardless of rank, title, funding status or project stage, and its projects come from STEM, economics and the digital arts. Past results are posted on the symposium winners page, and the 2024 list names first, second and third place in the Research Poster Awards.
Undergraduates also talk about their work in the Undergraduate Research Seminars, held Monday afternoons in Beacom 213 with a Zoom option. The spring 2026 schedule included talks on bee defensin-1 as an antibacterial and on synthetic data for detecting Parkinson's disease.
Funding for Undergraduate Research
Two programs pay for work with a faculty mentor. Each year DSU chooses a cohort of undergraduates for SRI awards through the Student Mentored Research Initiative. A project can start with the student or with the faculty member, and both receive budgetary support. The Research Assistant and Mentor Program, RAMP, gives students who qualify for Federal Work Study one-on-one research work with a faculty mentor in any major.
The Undergraduate Research office, led by a director in the Department of Math and Science, also gives students free membership in the Council on Undergraduate Research through the university's institutional account. One current project is a statewide microplastics baseline. An undergraduate team is sampling water and sediment from about 50 bodies of water in eastern South Dakota, Lake Madison and Lake Herman among them, with support from the East Dakota Water Development District.
Graduate Assistantships and the AI Sweden Exchange
DSU graduate assistantships come in teaching, research and administrative forms, with separate athletic positions. They carry tuition benefits and a monthly stipend for up to 19.5 hours of work a week. Assistants must be regular, full-time students on campus, and renewal each semester depends on a 3.25 GPA.
Master's and doctoral students in AI, computer science, cyber operations and related fields can apply for the Graduate Student Research Exchange Program with AI Sweden. The program pays a stipend, academic credit, lodging and airfare. It begins at AI Sweden's facilities in Gothenburg and continues at Madison Cyber Labs, where mixed teams of DSU and international students work on research topics or problems supplied by industry partners.
Writing Center and Theses
Learning Assistants at the Writing Center help at any stage of a project, in person or on Zoom. The center also runs group workshops on scholarly formatting, research and study skills. Distance students use its D2L site and can upload a draft to a dropbox for asynchronous feedback. Karl E. Mundt Library staff teach Zotero, EndNote and Research Rabbit in the Brownbag Series.
Finished work by honors and graduate students is collected in Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations, a collection in the Beadle Scholar repository. Most titles there concern cybersecurity, information systems and machine learning, with others in healthcare informatics and education.
Our editors give theses, dissertations and course papers a final pass for grammar, consistency and format before they are submitted. See our Dakota State University thesis editing and Dakota State University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.
From Our Writing Guides
Compiled by James Peterson Brown, PhD, Managing Editor of Editors For Students. Links checked October 2026.
Editors For Students is an independent editorial service and is not affiliated with Dakota State University, and your faculty may endorse our services individually. We look forward to helping you bring your DSU writing to its strongest, submission-ready form.